LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



Shelf..J.ii4 



UNITED ;^TATES OF AMERICA. 



i 



CRUMBLING IDOLS 



CRUMBLING IDOLS 



TWELVE ESSAYS ON ART 
DEALING CHIEFLY WITH 
LITERATURE, PAINTING AND THE 
DRAMA BY HAMLIN GARLAND 




CHICAGO AND CAMBRIDGE 

PUBLISHED BY STONE AND 

KIMBALL IN THE YEAR 

MDCCCXCIV 



"pssto^ 



APR 27 i 894"* i 






T6)732. 



l?lAr 



Copyright, 1894 

BY 

Hamlin Garland 



J 



TO THE MEN AND WOMEN 
OF AMERICA WHO HAVE THE 
COURAGE TO BE ARTISTS. 



ic!a 



To love the truth i?i an age of lies ; 

To holdfast art when hunger cries ; 
To sing love's song in spite of hate ^ 
Keepi?ig his heart inviolate, — 

These are the artisfs victories. 



\^^m 



A PERSONAL WORD. 

This book is not a history; it is not a 
formal essay : it is a series of suggestions. 

I do not assume to speak for any one but 
myself, — being an individualist, — and the 
power of this writing to destroy or build rests 
upon its reasonableness, simply. It does 
not carry with it the weight of any literary 
hierarchy. 

It is intended to weaken the hold of con- 
ventionahsm upon the youthful artist. It 
aims also to be constructive, by its state- 
ment and insistent re-statement that Amer- 
ican art, to be enduring and worthy, must be 
original and creative, not imitative. 

My contention is not against literary artists 
of the past, but against fetichism. Literary 
prostration is as hopeless and sterile as pros- 
tration before Baal or Isis or Vishnu. It is 
fitter to stand erect in these days. 



viii Crumbling Idols. 

Youth should study the past, not to get 
away from the present, but to understand 
the present and to anticipate the future. 
I believe in the mighty pivotal present. I 
believe in the living, not the dead. The 
men and women around me interest me 
more than the saints and heroes of other 
centuries. 

I do not advocate an exchange of masters, 
but freedom from masters. Life, Nature, — 
these should be our teachers. They are 
masters who do not enslave. 

Youth should be free from the dominion 
of the dead; therefore I defend the indi- 
vidual right of the modern creative mind to 
create in the image of life, and not in the 
image of any literary master, living or dead. 

There came a young man to Monet, say- 
ing, " Master, teach me to paint." To which 
Monet replied, " I do not teach painting ; I 
make paintings. There never has been, and 
there never will be, but one teacher : there 
she is!" and with one sweep of his arm 
he showed the young man the splendor of 
meadow and sunlight. " Go, learn of her, 
and listen to all she will say to you. If she 



A Personal Word. ix 

says nothing, enter a notary's office and copy 
papers; that, at least, is not dishonorable, 
and is better than copying nymphs." 

It is this spirit which is reinvigorating art 
in every nation of Europe ; and shall we sit 
down and copy the last epics of feudalism, 
and repeat the dying echoes of Romance ? 



CONTENTS. 



Page 

A Personal Word vii 

I. Provincialism 3 

II. New Fields 2i 

III. The Question of Success . . 33 

IV. Literary Prophecy 39 

V. Local Color in Art .... 57 

VI. The Local Novel 69 

VII. The Drift of the Drama . . 83 

VIII. The Influence of Ibsen ... 99 

IX. Impressionism 121 

X. Literary Centres 145 

XI. Literary Masters 165 

XII. A Recapitulatory Afterword 1S3 



PROVINCIALISM. 



THE history of Amer- 
«««,rT,.T^T«r TO.- ican literature is the his- 

PROVINCIALISM. 

tory of provincialism 

slowly becoming less all-pervasive — the 
history of the slow development of a dis- 
tinctive utterance. 

By provincialism I mean dependence upon 
a mother country for models of art produc- 
tion. This is the sense in which Taine or 
Veron would use the word. The " provin- 
cialism " which the conservative deplores is 
not provincialism, but the beginning of an 
indigenous literature. 

" The true makers of national literature," 
writes Posnet, in his " Comparative Litera- 
ture," " are the actions and thoughts of the 
nation itself. The place of these can never 
be taken by the sympathies of a cultured 
class too wide to be national, or those of a 
central academy too refined to be provincial. 
Provincialism is no ban in a truly national 
literature." 



4 Crumbling Idols. 

Using the word *' provincialism," therefore, 
from the point of view of the central acad- 
emy, we have had too little of it. That is to 
say, our colonial writers, and our writers 
from 1800 on to i860, had too little to do 
with the life of the American people, and too 
much concern with British critics. Using it 
in its literary sense of dependence upon Eng- 
land and classic models, we have had too 
much of it. It has kept us timidly imitating the 
great writers of a nation far separated from 
us naturally in its social and literary ideals. 

The whole development can be epitomized 
thus : Here on the eastern shore of America 
lay a chain of colonies predominantly Eng- 
lish, soon to be provinces. Like all colonists, 
they looked back to their mother-country for 
support and encouragement in intellectual 
affairs as in material things. They did not 
presume to think for themselves. But the 
Revolution taught them something. It 
strengthened the feeling of separate identity 
and responsibility. It liberated them in 
politics, but left them still provincial (depen- 
dent) in literary and religious things. There 
still remained some truth in the British sneer, 



Pro VI NCI a lis m. 5 

that American poets and artists were merely 
shadows or doubles successively of Pope, 
of Scott, of Byron, of Wordsworth, and of 
Tennyson. In all the space between the 
Revolution and the Civil War, American 
poets reflected the American taste fairly 
well, but the spirit and form of their work 
(with a few notable exceptions) was imitative. 

Here and there song was sung, from the 
sincere wish to embody American life and 
characteristic American thought. Each gen- 
eration grew less timid, and more manly 
and individual. The Civil War came on, 
and was an immense factor in building up 
freedom from old-world models, and in de- 
veloping native literature. National feeling 
had an immense widening and deepening. 
From the interior of America, men and 
women rose almost at once to make Ameri- 
can literature take on vitality and character. ^ 

American life had been lived, but not em- 
bodied in art. Native utterance had been 
overawed and silenced by academic English 
judgments ; but this began to change after 
the Civil War. The new field began to 
make itself felt, not all at once, but by 



6 Crumbling Idols. 

degrees, through " Snow-bound " and " The 
Biglow Papers" and "The Tales of the 
Argonauts " and the " Songs of the Sierras." 
But while this change was growing, there was 
coming in in the Eastern cities the spirit of a 
central academy that was to stand in pre- 
cisely the same relation to the interior of 
America that London formerly occupied with 
regard to the whole country. 

It may be that New York is to threaten and 
overawe the interior of America, as Paris 
reigns over the French provinces. The work 
of Mistral and the Felibrige may be needed 
with us to keep original genius from being 
silenced or distorted by a central academy 
which is based upon tradition rather than 
upon life and nature. Decentralization may 
come to be needed here, as in Europe. 

The evolutionist explains the past by the 
study of laws operative in the present, and 
by survivals of ancient conditions obscurely 
placed in modern things, like sinking ice- 
bergs in a southern sea. The attitude of 
mind (once universal with Americans) which 
measured everything by British standards, 



Provincialism. 7 

and timidly put new wine into old bottles, 
can still be found among the academic devo- 
tees and their disciples. They are survivals 
of a conception of life and literature once 
universal. 

The change which has taken place can be 
specifically illustrated in the West. That is 
to say, the general terms which could be ap- 
plied to the whole country up to the time of 
the Civil War can be applied specifically to 
the middle West to-day. As a Western man, 
I think I may speak freely, without being 
charged with undue prejudice toward the 
States I name. 

The school-bred West, broadly speaking, 
is as provincial in its art as it is assertive of 
Americanism in politics. The books it reads, 
the pictures it buys, are nearly all of the con- 
ventional sort, or, worse yet, imitations of 
the conventional. Its literary clubs valiantly 
discuss dead issues in English literature, and 
vote in majority against the indigenous and 
the democratic. They have much to say 
of the ideal and the universal in literature, 
quite in the manner of their academical 
instructors. 



8 Crumbling Idols. 

The lower ranks of Western readers, as 
everywhere, devour some millions of tons of 
romantic love-stories, or stories of detectives 
or Indians. It is a curious thing to contrast 
the bold assertion of the political exhorter of 
" America for Americans " with the enslave- 
ment of our readers and writers to various 
shades of imitative forms of feudalistic litera- 
ture. America is not yet democratic in art, 
whatever it may claim to be in politics. 

These facts are not to be quarrelled about, 
they are to be studied. They are signs of 
life, and not of death. It is better that these 
people should read such things than nothing 
at all. They will rise out of it. They can 
be influenced, but they must be approached 
on the side of life, and not by way of the 
academic. They are ready to support and 
be helped by the art which springs from life. 

It is the great intelligent middle class of 
America, curiously enough, who are appar- 
ently most provincial. With them the ver- 
dict of the world is all-important. Their 
education has been just sufficient to make 
them distrustful of their own judgment. 
They are largely the product of our schools. 



Pro VI NCI a l ism. 9 

They have been taught to believe that 
Shakespeare ended the drama, that Scott 
has closed the novel, that the English lan- 
guage is the greatest in the world, and that 
all other literatures are curious, but not at 
all to be ranked in power and humanity with 
the English literature, etc., etc. 

I speak advisedly of these things, because 
I have been through this instruction, which 
is well-nigh universal. This class is the 
largest class in America, and makes up the 
great body of school-bred Westerners. They 
sustain with a sort of desperation all the 
tenets of the conservative and romantic crit- 
icism in which they have been instructed. 

It can almost be stated as a rule without an 
exception that in our colleges there is no chair 
of English literature which is not dominated 
by conservative criticism, and where sneer- 
ing allusion to modern writers is not daily 
made. The pupil is taught to worship the 
past, and is kept blind to the mighty literary 
movements of his own time. If he comes 
to understand Ibsen, Tolstoy, Bjornson, 
Howells, Whitman, he must do it outside 
his instruction. 



lo Crumbling Idols. 

This instruction is well meaning, but it is 
benumbing to the faculties. It is essentially 
hopeless. It blinds the eyes of youth to the 
power and beauty of the life and literature 
around him. It worships the past, despises 
the present, and fears the future. Such 
teaching is profoundly pessimistic, because 
it sees literary ideals changing. It has not 
yet seen that metamorphosis is the law of 
all living things. It has not yet risen to 
the perception that the question for America 
to settle is not whether it can produce some- 
thing greater than the past, but whether it 
shall produce something different from the 
past. Our task is not to imitate, but to 
create. 

Instruction of this kind inevitably deflects 
the natural bent of the young artist, or dis- 
courages attempt altogether. It is the oppo- 
site of education ; that is, it represses rather 
than leads out the distinctive individuality 
of the student. 

These conservative ideas affect the local 
newspapers, and their literary columns are 
too often full of the same gloomy comment. 
They are timidly negative when not parti- 



Pro VI NCI a l ism. i i 

sanly conservative. They can safely praise 
Ruskin and Carlyle, and repeat an old slur 
on Browning or Whitman. 

There is also a class of critics who can 
launch into two-column criticisms of a new 
edition of " Rasselas," and leave unread a 
great novel by Tolstoy, or a new transla- 
tion of Brand, or a new novel by Howells. 
Their judgment is worthless to detect truth 
and beauty in a work of art close at hand. 
They wait for the judgment of the East, of 
London. 

The American youth is continually called 
upon by such critics to take Addison or 
Scott or Dickens or Shakespeare as a 
model. Such instruction leads naturally to 
the creation of blank-verse tragedies on 
Columbus and Washington, — a species of 
work which seems to the radical the crown- 
ing absurdity of misplaced effort. 

Thus, the American youth is everywhere 
turned away from the very material which 
he could best handle, which he knows most 
about, and which he really loves most, — 
material which would make him individual, 
and fill him with hope and energy. The 



12 Crumbling Idols. 

Western poet and novelist is not taught to 
see the beauty and significance of life near 
at hand. He is rather blinded to it by his 
instruction. 

He turns away from the marvellous 
changes which border-life subtends in its 
mighty rush toward civilization. He does 
not see the wealth of material which lies at 
his hand, in the mixture of races going on 
with inconceivable celerity everywhere in 
America, but with especial picturesqueness 
in the West. If he sees it, he has not the 
courage to write of it. 

If, here and there, one has reached some 
such perception, he voices it timidly, with an 
apologetic look in his eye. 

The whole matter appears to me to be a 
question of the individuality. I feel that 
Veron has stated this truth better than any 
other man. In his assault upon the central 
academy he says, in substance, *' Education 
should not conventionalize, should not mass 
together ; it should individualize." 

The Western youth, like the average 
school-bred American, lacks the courage of 
his real conviction. He really prefers the 



PR O VI NCI a LISM. 1 3 

modern writer, the modern painter, but he 
feels bound to falsify in regard to his real 
mind. As a creative intelligence, he lacks the 
courage to honestly investigate his surround- 
ings, and then stand by his judgment. Both 
as reader and writer, he dreads the Eastern 
comment. It is pitiful to see his eagerness to 
conform ; he will even go beyond his teach- 
ers in conforming. Thus he starts wrong. 
His standards of comparison are wrong. 
He is forced into writing to please some- 
body else, which is fatal to high art. 

To perceive the force of all this, and the 
real hopelessness of instruction according to 
conventional models, we have only to observe 
how little that is distinctive has been pro- 
duced by the great Western middle States, — 
say Wisconsin, Illinois, and Iowa. Of what 
does its writing consist ? 

A multitude of little newspapers, first of 
all, full of local news ; and larger newspapers 
that are political organs, with some little 
attention to literature on their inside pages. 
Their judgments are mainly conservative, 
but here and there in their news columns 
one finds sketches of life so vivid one won- 



14 Crumbling Idols. 

ders why writers so true and imaginative are 
not recognized and encouraged. 

The most of the short stories in these papers, 
however, are absolutely colorless, where they 
are not pirated exotics. In all that they 
call " literature " these papers generally re- 
flect what they beUeve to be the correct 
thing in literary judgment. In their un- 
conscious moments they are fine and true. 

Art, they think, is something far away, and 
literary subjects must be something select 
and very civilized. And yet for forty years 
an infinite drama has been going on in those 
wide spaces of the West, — a drama that is 
as thrilling, as full of heart and hope and 
battle, as any that ever surrounded any 
man; a life that was unlike any ever seen 
on the earth, and which should have pro- 
duced its characteristic literature, its native 
art chronicle. 

As for myself, I am overwhelmed by the 
majesty, the immensity, the infinite charm of 
the life that goes on around me. Themes 
are crying out to be written. Take, for a 
single example, the history of the lumbering 
district of the northern lakes, — a picturesque 



Pro VI NCI a l ism. i 5 

and peculiar life, that through a period of 
thirty years has been continually changing 
in all but a few of its essential features ; and 
yet this life has had only superficial rep- 
resentation in the sketches of the tourist 
or reporter; its inner heart has not been 
uttered. 

The subtle changes of thought and of life 
that have come with the rise of a city like St. 
Paul or MinneapoUs; the life of the great 
saw-mills and shingle-mills; and the river- 
life of the upper Mississippi are all fine sub- 
jects. So are the river towns hke Dubuque 
and Davenport, with their survivals of French 
life reaching down to the present year, and 
thus far unrecorded. 

Then there is the mixture of races ; the com- 
ing in of the German, the Scandinavian ; the 
marked yet subtle changes in their character. 
Then there is the building of railroads, with 
all their trickery and false promises and 
worthless bonds; the rise of millionnaires ; 
the deepening of social contrasts. In short, 
there is a great heterogeneous, shifting, brave 
population, a land teeming with unrecorded 
and infinite drama. 



1 6 Crumbling Idols. 

It is only to the superficial observer that 
this country seems colorless and dull ; to the 
veritist it is full of burning interest, greatest 
possibilities. I instance these localities be- 
cause I know something special about them ; 
but the same words apply to Pennsylvania, 
Ohio, or Kentucky. And yet how few writers 
of national reputation this eventful century- 
long march of civilization has produced ! 

We have had the figures, the dates, the 
bare history, the dime-novel statement of 
pioneer life, but how few real novels! How 
few accurate studies of speech and life! 
There it lies, ready to be put into the novel 
and the drama, and upon canvas ; and it must 
be done by those born into it. Joaquin Mil- 
ler has given us lines of splendid poetry 
touching this life, and Edward Eggleston, 
Joseph Kirkland, Opie Read, Octave Thanet, 
have dealt more or less faithfully with certain 
phases of it ; but mainly the mighty West, 
with its swarming millions, remains unde- 
lineated in the novel, the drama, and the 
poem. 

The causes of it, as I have indicated, are 
twofold : first, lack of a market ; and, second. 



Provincialism. 17 

lack of perception. This lack of perception 
of the art-possibilities of common American 
life has been due to several causes. Hard 
life, toil, lack of leisure, have deadened and 
calloused the perceiving mind, making life 
hard, dull, and uninteresting. But, beyond 
this, the right perception has been lacking 
on the part of instructors and critics. 
Everything has really tended to repress or 
distort the art-feeling of the young man or 
woman. They have been taught to imitate, 
not to create. 

But at last conditions are changing. All 
over the West young people are coming on 
who see that every literature in the past was 
at its best creative and not imitative. Here 
and there a paper or magazine lends itself 
to the work of encouraging the young writer 
in original work. They are likely to err 
now on the side of flattery. Criticism should 
be helpful, not indiscriminate either in praise 
or blame. 

And more than this, in every town of the 
interior there are groups of people whose 
firmness of conviction and broad culture 
make them the controlling power in all 



1 8 Crumbling Idols. 

local literary work. They are reading the 
most modern literature, and their judgments 
are not dependent upon New York or 
London, though they find themselves in full 
harmony with progressive artists every- 
where. They are clearly in the mi- 
nority, but they are a growing 
company everywhere, and 
their influence is felt by 
every writer of the 
progressive 
group. 



II. 



NEW FIELDS. 



II. 

NEW FIELDS. 



THE secret of every last- 
ing success in art or liter- 
ature lies, I believe, in a 
powerful, sincere, emotional concept of life 
first, and, second, in the acquired power to 
convey that concept to others. This leads 
necessarily to individuality in authorship, and 
to freedom from past models. 

This theory of the veritist is, after all, a 
statement of his passion for truth and for 
individual expression. The passion does not 
spring from theory; the theory rises from 
the love of the verities, which seems to 
increase day by day all over the Western 
world. 

The veritist, therefore, must not be taken 
to be dogmatic, only so far as he is per- 
sonally concerned. He is occupied in stating 
his sincere convictions, believing that only 
in that way is the cause of truth advanced. 
He addresses himself to the mind prepared 



22 Crumbling Idols. 

to listen. He destroys by displacement, not 
by attacking directly. 

It is a settled conviction with me that each 
locality must produce its own literary record, 
each special phase of life utter its own voice. 
There is no other way for a true local ex- 
pression to embody itself. The sun of truth 
strikes each part of the earth at a little dif- 
ferent angle; it is this angle which gives 
life and infinite variety to literature. It is 
the subtle differences which life presents in 
California and Oregon, for example, which 
will produce, and justify, a Pacific-Coast 
literature. 

In all that I have written upon local liter- 
ature, I have told the truth as I saw it. That 
others did not see it in the same light, was 
to be expected. And in writing upon Pacific- 
Coast literature, undoubtedly I shall once 
more be stating the cause of veritism ; for 
the question of Pacific-Coast literature is 
really the question of genuine American 
literature. The same principles apply to all 
sections of the land. 

The mere fact that a writer happens to 
live in California or Oregon will not make 



New Fields. 23 

him a part of that literature, any more than 
Stevenson's life in Samoa will make him a 
Samoan author. A nation, in the early part 
of its Hterary history, is likely to sweep to- 
gether all that can, by any construction, be 
called its literature ; but as it grows rich in 
real utterances, it eliminates one after the 
other all those writings which its clearer judg- 
ment perceives to be exotics. 

The Pacific Coast is almost like another 
world. Its distance from New York and 
Boston, its semi-tropic plants, its strange 
occupations, place it in a section by itself, 
just as the rest of the nation falls naturally 
into New England, the South, the Middle 
States, and the Northwest ; and, in the same 
way, from the Pacific States will continue 
to come a distinct local literature. Its 
vitality depends, in my judgment, upon this 
difference in quality. 

I say "continue to come," because we 
can never overlook the great work done 
by Joaquin Miller and Bret Harte. They 
came to this strange new land, young and 
impressionable. They became filled with the 
life and landscape almost with the same 



24 Crumbling Idols. 

power and sincerity as if they had been born 
here. Miller, especially, at his best, got far 
below superficial wonder. He attained the 
love for his subjects which is essential to 
sincere art. The best of his work could not 
have been produced anywhere else. It is 
native as Shasta. 

But neither of these men must be taken 
for model. Veritism, as I understand it, 
puts aside all models, even living writers. 
Whatever he may do unconsciously, the 
artist must consciously stand alone before 
nature and before life. Nature and Hfe have 
changed since Miller and H arte wrote. The 
California of to-day is quite different. The 
creative writer to-day, if true to himself, finds 
himself interested in other subjects, and finds 
himself believing in a different treatment of 
even the same material. 

There is no necessity of treating the same 
material, however. Vast changes, already in 
progress, invite the writer. The coming in 
of horticulture, the immigration of farmers 
from all the Eastern States; the mingling of 
races ; the feudalistic ownership of lands ; the 
nomadic life of the farm-hands, the growth 



New Fields. 25 

of cities, the passing Spanish civilization, — 
these are a few of the subjects which occur 
to me as worthy the best work of novelist 
and dramatist. 

Being " a farmer by birth and a novelist by 
occupation," I saw most clearly the literary 
possibiHties of the farmer's life in the valleys 
of California and in the stupendous forests 
of Oregon. 

I saw children moving along to school in 
the shadow of the most splendid mountains ; 
I saw a youth plowing, — behind him rose a 
row of palms, against which he stood like a 
figure of bronze in relief ; I saw young men 
and maidens walking down aisles of green 
and crimson pepper-trees, and the aisles led to 
blue silhouetted mountains ; I saw men herd- 
ing cattle where the sun beat with hot radi- 
ance, and strange cacti held out wild arms ; 
I saw children playing about cabins, setting 
at defiance the illimitable width and sun- 
less depths of the Oregon forests, — and I 
thought, " Perhaps one of these is the novelist 
or painter of the future." 

Perhaps the future poet of these spaces is 
plowing somewhere like that, because it must 



26 Crumbling Idols. 

be that from the splendor and dramatic con- 
trast of such scenes the poet will rise. He 
always has, and he always will. His feet 
will be on the soil like Whittier's, and like 
Miller's ; his song will differ from theirs be- 
cause he will be an individual soul, and be- 
cause his time and his environment will not 
be the same. 

Why should the Western artists and poets 
look away to Greece and Rome and Persia 
for themes '^. I have met Western people 
who were writing blank-verse tragedies of 
the Middle Ages and painting pictures of 
sirens and cherubs, and still considered them- 
selves Western writers and Western artists ! 
The reason is not hard to find. They had 
not risen to the perception of the significant 
and beautiful in their own environment, or 
they were looking for effects, without regard 
to their sincere conviction. They were poets 
of books, not of life. 

This insincerity is fatal to any great work 
of art. A man must be moved by some- 
thing higher than money, by something 
higher than hope of praise; he must have 
a sleepless love in his heart urging him 



New Fields. 27 

to re-create in the image the life he has 
loved. He must be burdened and without 
rest until he has given birth to his concep- 
tion. He will not be questioned when he 
comes; he will be known as a product of 
some one time and place, a voice speaking 
the love of his heart. 

There was much of dross and effectism in 
Miller's earlier work, but it was filled with 
an abounding love of Sierra mountains and 
forests and moving things, which made him 
the great figure of the Coast. But the litera- 
ture which is to come from the Pacific slope, 
in my judgment, will be intimate and human 
beyond any California precedent. It will 
not dodge or equivocate. It will state the 
truth. It will not be spectacular, it will not 
deal with the outside (as a tourist must do). 
It will deal with the people and their home 
dramas, their loves and their ambitions. It 
will not seek themes. Themes will crowd 
upon them and move them. 

The lovers who wander down the aisles of 
orange or lemon or pepper trees will not 
marvel at blooms and shrubs. Their presence 
and perfume will be familiar and lovely, not 



28 Crumbling Idols. 

strange. The stark lines of the fir and the 
broadsword-thrust of the banana-leaf will 
not attract their surprised look. All will be 
as friendly and grateful as the maple or the 
Lombardy poplar to the Iowa school-boy. 

A new literature will come with the gener- 
ation just coming to manhood and woman- 
hood on the Coast. If rightly educated, their 
eyes will turn naturally to the wheat-fields, 
the forests, the lanes of orange-trees, the 
ranges of unsurpassed mountains. They 
will try to express in the novel, the drama, in 
painting and in song, the love and interest 
they take in the things close at hand. 

This literature will not deal with crime 
and abnormities, nor with deceased persons. 
It will deal, I believe, with the wholesome 
love of honest men for honest women, with 
the heroism of labor, the comradeship of men, 
— a drama of average types of character, in- 
finitely varied, but always characteristic. 

In this literature will be the shadows of 
mountain-islands, the sweep of dun plains, 
and dark-blue mountain-ranges silhouetted 
against a burning yellow sky. It will deal 
with mighty forests and with man's brave war 



New Fields. 29 

against the gloom and silence. It will have 
in it types of vanishing races, and prophecies 
of coming citizens. It will have the per- 
fume of the orange and lemon trees, the pur- 
ple dapple of spicy pepper-tree fruit, the 
grace of drooping, fern-like acacia leaves. 

And in the midst of these sights and 
sounds, moving to and fro in the shadow of 
these mountains, and feeling the presence of 
this sea, will be men and women working 
out the drama of life in a new way, thinking 
new thoughts, building a happier, sunnier 
order of things, perhaps, where the laborer 
will face the winter always without fear and 
without despondency. 

When the real Pacific literature comes, it 

will not be subject to misunderstanding. It 

will be such a literature as no other 

locality could produce, a literature 

that could not have been written 

in any other time, or among 

other surroundings. 

That is the test 

of a national 

literature. 



III. 



THE QUESTION OF SUCCESS. 



jjj BUT the question forced 

>UESTION ^^ ^^^ ^^"^^ ^"*^^' ^"^^^ 
when he is well disposed 



OF SUCCESS ^ J J ,. . , . ,. 

toward dealing with indig- 
enous material, is, Will it pay? Is there a 
market for me ? 

Let me answer by pointing out that almost 
every novelist who has risen distinctively out 
of the mass of story-writers in America, re- 
presents some special local life or some spe- 
cial social phase. 

Mr. Cable stands for the Creole South ; 
Miss Murfree speaks for the mountaineer- 
life in Tennessee ; Joel Harris represents the 
new study of the negro ; Miss Wilkins voices 
the thought of certain old New England 
towns ; Mr. Howells represents truthful 
treatment of the cities of Boston and New 
York ; Joseph Kirkland has dealt with early 
Illinois life ; Harold Frederic has written 
two powerful stories of interior New York 
3 



34 Crumbling Idols. 

life ; and so on through a list of equally brave 
and equally fine writers. 

I think it may be said, therefore, that suc- 
cess in indigenous lines is every year becom- 
ing more certain. You will not find your 
market in the West yet, but the great maga- 
zines of the country are every year gaining 
in Americanism. 

If we look away to England, we see the 
same principle illustrated. The most vital 
blood of the English novel to-day comes from 
the Provinces. Barrie with his " A Window 
in Thrums," Kipling with his " Tales of the 
Hills," Olive Schreiner with " An African 
Farm," Jane Barlow with " Irish Idyls," 
are putting to rout the two-volume British 
novel, which never leaves anything out or 
puts anything in. It is precisely the same 
movement which is going on in Norway, 
Holland, Hungary, — all over Europe, in fact. 
Wherever the common man rises to the 
power of stating his interest in life, it takes 
the form of local fiction. 

The consideration of success, however, is 
not the power which makes the true artist. 
Deeper yet must be the keen creative delight, 



The Question of Success. 35 

— the sweetest, deepest pleasure the artist 
knows ; the passion which sends him sup- 
perless to bed in order that his story 
shall reflect his own ideal, his own concept 
of life. 

But it may be concluded that the en- 
couragement of this local fiction will rob our 
literature of its dignity. There is no dignity 
in imitation, it is mere pretence ; to seek dig- 
nity in form is Hke putting on stilts. The 
assumption of the epic by an American poet 
is like putting a chimney-pot hat on a child. 
If we insist on sincerity, the question of dig- 
nity will take care of itself. Truth is a fine 
preparation for dignity, and for beauty as 
well. 

Art, I must insist, is an individual thing, — 
the question of one man facing certain facts 
and telling his individual relations to them. 
His first care must be to present his own 
concept. This is, I believe, the essence of 
veritism : " Write of those things of which 
you know most, and for which you care 
most. By so doing you will be true to your- 
self, true to your locality, and true to your 
time." 



36 Crumbling Idols. 

I am a Western man ; my hopes and am- 
bitions for the West arise from absolute 
knowledge of its possibilities. I want to see 
its prairies, its river banks and coules, its 
matchless skies, put upon canvas. I want 
to see its young writers writing better books, 
its young artists painting pictures that are 
true to the life they live and the life they 
know. I want to see the West supporting its 
own painters and musicians and novelists ; 
and to that end I want to state my earnest 
belief, which I have carefully matched with 
the facts of literary history, that, to take a 
place in the long line of poets and artists 
in the English language, the Western 
writer must, above all other things, 
be true to himself and to his 
time. To imitate is fatal. 
Provincia lism {that is 
to say, localism) 
is no bait to 
a 7iational 
literature. 



IV. 



LITERARY PROPHECY. 



IT is interesting 
to observe that all 

LITERARY PROPHECY. 

literary movements 
in the past had little or no prevision. The 
question of their future, their permanence, 
did not disturb them. My reading does not 
disclose to me that Euphues or Spenser j 
ever thought of the dark future. Each 
school lived for its day and time, apparently, 
without disturbing prophecy. 

Pope, the monarch of the circumscribed, 
the emperor of literary lace and ruffles, so 
far as I have read, had no gloomy fore- 
bodings. His dictatorship was the most 
absolutely despotic and long-continued dic- 
tatorship the literary history of England has 
ever seen. He could be pardoned for never 
imagining that real flowers could come to be 
enjoyed better than gilt and scarlet paper 
roses, all ahke. It is not to be wondered 
at that he had no prevision of Whitman or 
Ibsen, in the joyous jog-trot of his couplets. 



40 Crumbling Idols. 

It is probable that where any thought of 
the future troubled the artist, it unnerved 
him. Thomas Browne saw oblivion like a 
dark sea beneath him, but his view of life 
was mainly statical ; he had no basis for 
optimistic outlook. His skies were hung 
with black. 

Take larger movements, — the Reforma- 
tion, for example. This movement, in its 
day, filled the whole religious history of 
of Europe. It transformed empires, and 
planted colonies in the wilderness of the 
west. It dominated art, literature, archi- 
tecture, laws, and yet it was but a phase of 
intellectual development. Its order was 
transitory ; and had an evolutionist been 
born into that austere time, he would have 
predicted the reaction to enjoyment of 
worldly things which followed, and would 
have foretold the sure passing away of the 
whole world as it was then colored and dom- 
inated by puritanic thought. 

In art, this narrowness and sincerity of 
faith in itself has been the principal source 
of power of every movement in the past. 
To question was to weaken. Had Spenser 



Literary Prophecy. 41 

suspected the prosiness and hollow absurdity 
of his combats (wherein the hero always 
wins), had he perceived something else in 
life better worth while than allegory and the 
endless recounting of tales of chivalry, he 
would have failed to embody as he did the 
glittering and caparisoned barbarism of his 
forbears. And the crown which Pope wore 
would have rested like a plat of thorns on 
his brow had he been visited by disturbing 
visions of a time when men would prefer 
their poetry in some other form than coup- 
lets or quatrains, and would even question 
whether the "Essay on Man" was poetry 
or not. 

With no conception of what the world had 
been, they had no guiding line to point to 
that which the world was to be. The stati- 
cal idea of life and literature held in all 
thought, — except where men believed the 
world was fallen from a golden age into 
darkness and decay, or that it was again 
declining to a fall. 

Because Shakespeare and the group around 
him were feudalistic, and did not believe in 
the common personality ; because the critics 



42 Crumbling Idols. 

of Dryden's day believed Shakespeare was a 
savage ; because each age beheved in its art 
and in the world of thought around it, — there- 
fore has each real age of literature embodied 
more or less faithfully its own outlook upon 
life, and gone peacefully, if not arrogantly, 
to its grave at last, in blessed ignorance of 
the green dust which the library of the future 
held in store for it. 

In the thought of philosophers, so-called, 
the same traditional feeling held. The ob- 
server, the independent investigator of facts, 
could hardly be said to have existed. Tra- 
dition, the organized conceptions of the race, 
reigned over the individual, and men did not 
think. The Scriptures had said it all. There 
was no room for science. 

But while each age can be held in general 
terms to have had no prevision, it is probable 
that some few of its greatest minds caught 
a glimpse of coming change, and that this 
power of prophecy grew slowly, and the 
power of tradition grew less binding, until 
there came upon the world the splendid light 
of the development theory, uttered by Spencer 
and Darwin. I think it is not too much to 



Literary Prophecy. 43 

say that, previous to the writing of these 
men, definite prevision, even on the broadest 
lines, was impossible, either in sociology or 
literature. 

Until men came to see system and pro- 
gression, and endless but definite succession 
in art and literature as in geologic change ; 
until the law of progress was enunciated, no 
conception of the future and no reasonable 
history of the past could be formulated. 
Once prove literature and art subject to 
social conditions, to environment and social 
conformation, and the dominance of the epic 
in one age, and of the drama in another, be- 
came as easy to understand and to infer as 
any other fact of a people's history. 

The study of evolution has made the 
present the most critical and self-analytical 
of all ages known to us. It has liberated 
the thought of the individual as never be- 
fore, and the power of tradition grows 
fainter year by year. 

It is not my purpose to write the history 
of the development of literature. I have 
drifted farther into the general subject than 
I intended. I am merely preparing the way 



44 Crumbling Idols. 

for some more or less valuable ideas upon 
the future of American fiction. 

Evolutionists explain the past by means of 
laws operative in the present, by survivals 
of change. In an analogous way, we may 
infer (broadly, of course) the future of so- 
ciety, and therefore its art, from changes 
just beginning to manifest themselves. The 
developed future is always prophesied in the 
struggling embryos of the present. In the 
mold of the present are the swelling acorns 
of future forests. 

Fiction already commands the present in 
the form of the novel of life. It already out- 
ranks verse and the drama as a medium of 
expression. It is so flexible, admits of so 
many points of view, and comprehends so 
much (uniting painting and rhythm to the 
drama and the pure narrative), that it has 
come to be the highest form of expression in 
Russia, Germany, Norway, and France. It 
occupies with easy tolerance the high seats 
in the synagogue, and felicitates the other 
arts on having got in, — or rather stayed in 
at all. At its best it certainly is the most 
modern and unconventional of arts. 



Literary Prophecy. 45 

Taking it as it stands to-day in America, 
the novel not only shows its relation to the 
past and the present, but it holds within 
itself prophecies of impending change. No 
other medium of art expression is so sensi- 
tive to demand. Change is sure. What 
will it be ? 

We are about to enter the dark. We need 
a light. This flaming thought from Whit- 
man will do for the search-light of the pro- 
found deeps : All that the past was not, the 
future will be. 

If the past was bond, the future will be 
free. If the past was feudalistic, the future 
will be democratic. If the past ignored and 
trampled upon women, the future will place 
them side by side with men. If the child of 
the past was ignored, the future will cherish 
him. And fiction will embody these facts. 

If the past was dark and battleful and 
bloody and barbarous, the future will be 
peaceful and sunny. If the past celebrated 
lust and greed and love of power, the future 
will celebrate continence and humility and 
altruism. If the past was the history of a 
few titled personalities riding high on obscure 



46 Crumbling Idols. 

waves of nameless, suffering humanity, the 
future will be the day of high average per- 
sonality, the abolition of all privilege, the 
peaceful walking together of brethren, equals 
before nature and before the law. And 
fiction will celebrate this life. 

If the past was gross and materialistic in 
its religion, worshipping idols of wood and 
stone, demanding sacrifices to appease God, 
using creed as a club to make men conform 
to a single interpretation of man's relation to 
nature and his fellows, then the future will 
be high and pure and subtle in its religious 
interpretations ; and there will be granted to 
individuals perfect freedom in the interpre- 
tation of nature's laws, a freedom in fact, as 
well as in name. And to fiction is given 
the task of subtilely embodying this splendid 
creed. 

All that the past was not, the future will 
be. The question is not one of similarity, 
but of difference. 

As we run swiftly over the development of 
literary history, we see certain elements being 
left behind while others are carried forward. 



Literary Prophecy. ^7 

Those which are carried forward are, how- 
ever, extremely general and fundamental. 
They are the bones of art, not its curve of 
flesh or flush of blood. 

One of these central elements of unchang- 
ing power, always manifest in every really 
great Hterature, is sincerity in method. This 
produces contemporaneousness. The great 
writers of the past did not write "for all 
time," — not even for the future. They mainly 
were occupied in interesting some portion of 
their fellow-men. Shakespeare had no care 
and little thought of the eighteenth century 
in his writing. 

He studied his time, and tried sincerely to 
state it in terms that would please those whom 
he considered his judicious friends. Thus he 
reflected (indirectly) the feudal age, for that 
was the dominant thought of his day. So 
Dryden and Pope, each at his best, portrayed 
his day, putting his sincere and original com- 
ment upon the life around him, flavoring 
every translation he made with the vice and 
lawlessness which he felt to be the prevailing 
elements of his immediate surroundings. In 
the main, they believed in themselves. 



48 Crumbling Idols. 

Measured by our standard, the writers of 
the Restoration period were artificial in 
manner and vile in thought. They smell 
always of the bawdy-house, and their dramas 
sicken us with the odor of the filth through 
which their writers reeled the night before. 
To themselves they were elegant, truthful, 
and worthy of being taken seriously at their 
best and forgiven for their worst. 

The romantic school of fiction, while it 
reigned, was self-justifiable, at least in great 
figures like Scott and Hugo, because it was 
a sincere expression of their likings and dis- 
likings. It reflected directly and indirectly 
their rebellion against the old, and put in evi- 
dence their conception of the office of litera- 
ture. It was also wholesome, and, in Hugo, 
consciously humanitarian. The romancers 
did their work. It will never be done so well 
again, because all that follows their model 
will be imitative ; theirs was the genuine 
romanticism. 

The fiction of the future will not be roman- 
tic in any such sense as Scott or Hugo 
was romantic, because to do that would be 
to re-live the past, which is impossible; to 



Literary Prophecy. 49 

imitate models, which is fatal. Reader and 
writer will both be wanting. The element of 
originality follows from the power of the ele- 
ment of sincerity. " All original art," says 
Taine, "is self-regulative." It does not 
imitate. It does not follow models. It 
stands before life, and is accountant to life 
and self only. Therefore, the fiction of the 
future must be original, and therefore self- 
regulative. 

The fiction of the past dealt largely with 
types, often with abstractions or caricatures. 
It studied men in heroic attitudes. It con- 
cerned itself mainly with love and war. It 
did not study men intimately, except in 
vicious or criminal moods. 

As fiction has come to deal more and more 
with men and less with abstractions, it will 
be safe to infer that this will continue. 
Eugene Veron covered the ground fully when 
he said, " We care no longer for gods or 
heroes; we care for men." This is true of 
veritism, whose power and influence augment 
daily ; even the romance writers feel its 
influence, and are abandoning their swiftly 
running love-stories for studies of character. 
4 



50 Crumbling Idols. 

Like the romantic school of painting, they 
are affected by the influence they fear. 

The novels of Bulwer, Scott, and Hugo, 
are, after all, mixed with aristocratic influence, 
though Hugo had much more of what might 
be called the modern spirit, even in his so- 
called historical studies. 

It is safe to say that the fiction of the 
future will grow more democratic in outlook 
and more individuaHstic in method. Impres- 
sionism, in its deeper sense, means the state- 
ment of one's own individual perception of 
life and nature, guided by devotion to truth. 
Second to this great principle is the law that 
each impression must be worked out faith- 
fully on separate canvases, each work of 
art complete in itself. Literalism, the book 
that can be quoted in bits, is hke a picture 
that can be cut into pieces. It lacks unity. 
The higher art would seem to be the art 
that perceives and states the relations of 
things, giving atmosphere and relative values 
as they appeal to the sight. 

Because the novels of the past were long, 
involved, given to discussion and comment 
upon the action, so the novel of the future 
will be shorter and simpler and less obvious 



Literary Prophecy. 51 

in its method. It will put its lessons into 
general effect rather than into epigrams. 
Discussion will be in the relations of its 
characters, not on quotable lines or para- 
graphs. Like impressionism in painting, it 
will subordinate parts to the whole. 

It will teach, as all earnest literature has 
done, by effect ; but it will not be by direct 
expression, but by placing before the reader 
the facts of life as they stand related to the 
artist. This relation will not be put into 
explanatory notes, but will address itself to 
the perception of the reader. 

Turning our attention for a moment to the ^ 
actualities of modern fiction, we find destruc- ^^ 
tive criticism to be the most characteristic 
literary expression of the present and of the 
immediate future, because of this slow rising 
of the literary mind to prevision of change 
in life. 

Because the fictionist of to-day sees a 
more beautiful and peaceful future social 
life, and, in consequence, a more beautiful 
and peaceful literary life, therefore he is 
encouraged to deal truthfully and at close ' 
grapple with the facts of his immediate 
present. His comment virtually amounts to 



52 Crumbling Idols. 

satire or prophecy, or both. Because he is 
sustained by love and faith in the future, 
he can be mercilessly true. He strikes at 
thistles, because he knows the unrotted seed 
of loveliness and peace needs but sun and 
the air of freedom to rise to flower and 
fragrance. 

The realist or veritist is really an optimist, 
a dreamer. He sees life in terms of what it 
might be, as well as in terms of what it is; 
but he writes of what is, and, at his best, 
suggests what is to be, by contrast. He 
aims to be perfectly truthful in his delinea- 
tion of his relation to life, but there is a 
tone, a color, which comes unconsciously 
into his utterance, like the sobbing stir of 
the muted violins beneath the frank, clear 
song of the clarionet ; and this tone is one 
of sorrow that the good time moves so 
slowly in its approach. 

He aims to hasten the age of beauty and 
peace by delineating the ugliness and war- 
fare of the present; but ever the converse 
of his picture rises in the mind of the 
reader. He sighs for a lovelier life. He 
is tired of warfare and diseased sexualism, 
and Poverty the mother of Envy. He 



Literary Prophecy. 53 

is haggard with sympathetic hunger, and 
weary with the struggle to maintain his 
standing place on this planet, which he con- 
ceives was given to all as the abode of 
peace. With this hate in his heart and this 
ideal in his brain the modern man writes 
his stories of life. They are not always 
pleasant, but they are generally true, and 
always they provoke thought. 

This element of sad severity will change 
as conditions change for the common man, 
but the larger element of sincerity, with re- 
sulting contemporaneousness, will remain. 
Fiction, to be important and successful, 
must be original and suited to its time. As 
the times change, fiction will change. This 
must always be remembered. 

The surest way to write for all time is to 
embody the present in the finest form with 
the highest sincerity and with the frankest 
truthfulness. The surest way to write for 
other lands is to be true to our own land and 
true to the scenes and people we love, and 
love in a human and direct way without 
being educated up to it or down to it. 

The people can never be educated to love 
the past, to love Shakespeare and Homer. 



54 Crumbling Idols. 

Students may be taught to believe they 
believe, but the great masses of American 
readers want the modern comment. They 
want the past colored to suit their ideas of 
life, — that is, the readers of romance ; on 
higher planes of reading they want sincere 
delineation of modern life and thought, and 
Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Dante, Milton, 
are fading away into mere names, — books 
we should read but seldom do. 

Thus it will be seen that the fiction of 
the immediate future will be the working 
out of plans already in hand. There is 
small prophecy in it, after all. We have 
but to examine the ground closely, and we 
see the green shoots of the coming harvest 
beneath our very feet. We have but to 
examine closely the most naive and 
local of our novels, and the coming 
literature will be foreshadowed 
there. The local novelist 
seems to be the com- 
ing woman ! Lo- 
cal color is 
the royal 
robe. 



/ 



V. 
LOCAL COLOR IN ART. 



LOCAL color in fiction is 

demonstrably the life of 
LOCAL COLOR ^ . ^ 

fiction. It IS the native 

IN ART. , , ,.„ . . 

element, the differentiating 
element. It corresponds to the endless and 
vital charm of individual peculiarity. It is the 
differences which interest us ; the similarities 
do not please, do not forever stimulate and 
feed as do the differences. Literature would 
die of dry rot if it chronicled the similarities 
only, or even largely. 

Historically, the local color of a poet or 
dramatist is . of the greatest value. The 
charm of Horace is the side light he throws 
on the manners and customs of his time. 
The vital in Homer lies, after all, in his 
local color, not in his abstractions. Because 
the sagas of the North delineate more 
exactly how men and women lived and 
wrought in those days, therefore they have 
always appealed to me with infinitely greater 
power than Homer. 



58 Crumbling Idols. 

Similarly, it is the local color of Chaucer 
that interests us to-day. We yawn over his 
tales of chivalry which were in the manner 
of his contemporaries, but the Miller and 
the Priest interest us. Wherever the man 
of the past in literature showed us what he 
really lived and loved, he moves us. We 
understand him, and we really feel an in- 
terest in him. 

Historically, local color has gained in 
beauty and suggestiveness and humanity 
from Chaucer down to the present day. 
Each age has embodied more and more of 
its actual life and social conformation until 
the differentiating qualities of modern art 
make the best paintings of Norway as dis- 
tinct in local color as its fiction is vital 
and indigenous. 

Every great moving literature to-day is 
full of local color. It is this element which 
puts the Norwegian and Russian almost at 
the very summit of modern novel writing, 
and it is the comparative lack of this distinc- 
tive flavor which makes the English and 
French take a lower place in truth and 
sincerity. 



Local Color i.v Art. 59 

Everywhere all over the modern European 
world, men are writing novels and dramas as 
naturally as the grass or corn or flax grows. 
The Provengal, the Hun, the Catalonian, the 
Norwegian, is getting a hearing. This liter- 
ature is not the literature of scholars ; it is 
the literature of lovers and doers ; of men 
who love the modern and who have not been 
educated to despise common things. 

These men are speaking a new word. 
They are not hunting themes, they are strug- 
gling to express. 

Conventional criticism does not hamper or 
confine them. They are rooted in the soil. 
They stand among the corn-fields and they 
dig; in the peat-bogs. They concern them- 
selves with modern and very present words 
and themes, and they have brought a new 
word which is to divide in half the domain 
of beauty. 

They have made art the re-creation of the 
beautiful ajid the significant. Mere beauty 
no longer suffices. Beauty is the world-old 
aristocrat who has taken for mate this 
mighty young plebeian Significance. Their 
child is to be the most human and humane 
literature ever seen. 



6o Crumbling Idols. 

It has taken the United States longer to 
achieve independence of English critics 
than it took to free itself from old-world 
political and economic rule. Its political 
freedom was won, not by its gentlemen and 
scholars, but by its yeomanry; and in the 
same way our national literature will come 
in its fulness when the common American 
rises spontaneously to the expression of his 
concept of life. 

The fatal blight upon most American art 
has been, and is to-day, its imitative quality, 
which has kept it characterless and facti- 
tious, — a forced rose-culture rather than the 
free flowering of native plants. 

Our writers despised or feared the home 
market. They rested their immortality upon 
the " universal theme," which was a theme 
of no interest to the public and of small 
interest to themselves. 

During the first century and a half, our 
literature had very little national color. It 
was quite like the utterance of corresponding 
classes in England. But at length Bryant and 
Cooper felt the influence of our mighty forests 
and prairies. Whittier uttered something of 



Local Color in Art. 6i 

New England boy-life, and Thoreau prodded 
about among newly discovered wonders, and 
the American literature got its first start. 

Under the influence of Cooper came the 
stories of wild life from Texas, from Ohio, 
and from Illinois. The wild, rough settle- 
ments could not produce smooth and cultured 
poems or stories ; they only furnished forth 
rough-and-ready anecdotes, but in these 
stories there were hints of something fine 
and strong and native. 

As the settlements increased in size, as 
the pressure of the forest and the wild beast 
grew less, expression rose to a higher plane ; 
men softened in speech and manner. All 
preparations were being made for a local 
literature raised to the level of art. 

The Pacific slope was first in the line. By 
the exceptional interest which the world took 
in the life of the gold fields, and by the for- 
ward urge which seems always to surprise the 
pessimist and the scholiast, two young men 
were plunged into that wild life, led across 
the plains set in the shadow of Mount Shasta, 
and local literature received its first great 
marked, decided impetus. 



62 Crumbling Idols. 

To-day we have in America, at last, a 
group of writers who have no suspicion of 
imitation laid upon them. Whatever faults 
they may be supposed to have, they are at 
any rate, themselves. American critics can 
depend upon a characteristic American liter- 
ature of fiction and the drama from these 
people. 

The corn has flowered, and the cotton-boll 
has broken into speech. 

Local color — what is it ? It means that 
the writer spontaneously reflects the life 
which goes on around him. It is natural 
and unstrained art. 

It is, in a sense, unnatural and artificial to 
find an American writing novels of Russia 
or Spain or the Holy Land. He cannot hope 
to do it so well as the native. The best he 
can look for is that poor word of praise, 
" He does it very well, considering he is an 
alien." 

If a young writer complain that there are 
no themes at home, that he is forced to go 
abroad for prospective and romance, I an- 
swer there is something wrong in his educa- 
tion or his perceptive faculty. Often he is 



Local Color lv Art. 63 

more anxious to win a money success than 
to be patiently one of art's unhurried devotees. 

I can sympathize with him, however, for 
criticism has not helped him to be true. 
Criticism of the formal kind and spontane- 
ous expression are always at war, like the 
old man and the youth. They may politely 
conceal it, but they are mutually destructive. 

Old men naturally love the past ; the books 
they read are the master-pieces ; the great 
men are all dying off, they say ; the young man 
should treat lofty and universal themes, as 
they used to do. These localisms are petty. 
These truths are disturbing. Youth annoys 
them. Spontaneousness is formlessness, and 
the criticism that does not call for the ab- 
stract and the ideal and the beautiful is lead- 
ing to destruction, these critics say. 

And yet there is a criticism which helps, 
which tends to keep a writer at his best ; but 
such criticism recognizes the dynamic force 
of a literature, and tries to spy out tenden- 
cies. This criticism to-day sees that local 
color means national character, and is aid- 
ing the young writer to treat his themes in 
the best art. 



64 Crumbling Idols. 

I assert it is the most natural thing in 
the world for a man to love his native land 
and his native, intimate surroundings. Born 
into a web of circumstances, enmeshed in 
common life, the youthful artist begins to 
think. All the associations of that child- 
hood and the love-life of youth combine to 
make that web of common affairs, threads of 
silver and beads of gold; the near-at-hand 
things are the dearest and sweetest after all. 

As the reader will see, I am using local 
color to mean something more than a forced 
study of the picturesque scenery of a State. 

Local color in a novel means that it has 
such quality of texture attd back-ground that 
it could not have been written in any other 
place or by ajiy one else than a native. 

It means a statement of life as indigenous 
as the plant-growth. It means that the pic- 
turesque shall not be seen by the author, — 
that every tree and bird and mountain shall 
be dear and companionable and necessary, 
not picturesque ; the tourist cannot write the 
local novel. 

From this it follows that local color must 
not be put in for the sake of local color. It 



Local Color in Art. 6^ 

must go in, it will go in, because the writer 
naturally carries it with him half uncon- 
sciously, or conscious only of its signifi- 
cance, its interest to him. 

He must not stop to think whether it will 
interest the reader or not. He must be 
loyal to himself, and put it in because he 
loves it. If he is an artist, he will make his 
reader feel it through his own emotion. 

What we should stand for is not univer- 
sality of theme, but beauty and strength of 
treatment, leaving the writer to choose his 
theme because he loves it. 

Here is the work of the critic. Recog- 
nizing that the theme is beyond his control, 
let him aid the young writer to delineate 
simply and with unwavering strokes. Even 
here the critic can do little, if he is possessed 
of the idea that the young writer of to-day 
should model upon Addison or Macaulay or 
Swift. 

There are new criterions to-day in writing 
as in painting, and individual expression is 
the aim. The critic can do much to aid a 
young writer to not copy an old master or 
any other master. Good criticism can aid 
S 



66 Crumbling Idols. 

him to be vivid and simple and unhackneyed 
in his technique, the subject is his own 
affair. 

I agree with him who says, Local art must 
be raised to the highest levels in its expres- 
sion ; but in aiding this perfection of tech- 
nique we must be careful not to cut into 
the artist's spontaneity. To apply 
ancient dogmas of criticism to 
our life and literature would 
be benumbing to ar- 
tist and fatal to 
his art. 



i 



VI. 



THE LOCAL NOVEL. 



THE local novel 
seems to be the heir- 

THE LOCAL NOVEL. , , . 

apparent to the king- 
dom of poesy. It is already the most prom- 
ising of all literary attempts to-day ; certainly 
it is the most sincere. It seems but begin- 
ning its work. It is " hopelessly contem- 
poraneous ; " that is its strength. It is (at 
its best) unaffected, natural, emotional. It is 
sure to become all-powerful. It will redeem 
American literature, as it has already re- 
deemed the South from its conventional and 
highly wrought romanticism. 

By reason of growing truth and sincerity 
the fiction of the South has risen from the 
dead. It is now in the spring season of 
shooting wilding plants and timorous blades 
of sown grains. Its future is assured. Its 
soil is fertilized with the blood of true men. 
Its women are the repositories of great, vital, 
sincere, emotional experiences which will 
inevitably appear in their children, and at 



70 Crumbling Idols. 

last in art, and especially in fiction. The 
Southern people are in the midst of a battle 
more momentous than the Rebellion, because 
it is the result of the Rebellion ; that is, the 
battle of intrenched privilege against the 
swiftly-spreading democratic idea of equality 
before the law and in the face of nature. 

They have a terribly, mightily dramatic 
race-problem on their hands. The South is 
the meeting-place of winds. It is the seat 
of swift and almost incalculable change ; and 
this change, this battle, this strife of invisible 
powers, is about to enter their fiction.. 

The negro has already entered it. He has 
brought a musical speech to his masters, and 
to the new fiction. He has brought a strange 
and pleading song into music. The finest 
writers of the New South already find him a 
never-failing source of interest. He is not, 
of course, the only subject of Southern fic- 
tion, nor even the principal figure ; but he is 
a necessary part, and a most absorbingly 
interesting part. 

The future of fiction in the South will also 
depict the unreconstructed rebel unreser- 
vedly, and the race-problem without hate 



The Local Novel. 71 

or contempt or anger; for the highest art 
will be the most catholic in its sympathy. 
It will delineate vast contending forces, and 
it will be a great literature. 

The negro will enter the fiction of the 
South, first, as subject ; second, as artist in 
his own right. His first attempts will be imi- 
tative, but he will yet utter himself, as surely 
as he lives. He will contribute a poetry and 
a novel as peculiarly his own as the songs 
he sings. He may appear, also, in a strange 
half-song, half-chant, and possibly in a 
drama peculiar to himself; but in some 
form of fiction he will surely utter the 
sombre and darkly-florid genius for emo- 
tional utterance which characterizes him. 

In the North the novel will continue local 
for some time to come. It will delineate the 
intimate life and speech of every section of our 
enormous and widely scattered republic. It 
will catch and fix in charcoal the changing, 
assimilating races, delineating the pathos 
and humor and the infinite drama of their 
swift adjustment to new conditions. Cali- 
fornia, New Mexico, Idaho, Utah, Oregon, 
each wonderful locality in our Nation of 



72 Crumbling Idols. 

Nations will yet find its native utterance. 
The superficial work of the tourist and 
outsider will not do. The real noveUst of 
these sections is walking behind the plow or 
trudging to school in these splendid potential 
environments. 

This local movement will include the cities 
as well, and St. Louis, Chicago, San Fran- 
cisco, will be delineated by artists born of 
each city, whose work will be so true that it 
could not have been written by any one from 
the outside. The real utterance of a city or 
a locality can only come when a writer is 
born out of its intimate heart. To such an 
one, nothing will be " strange " or " pictur- 
esque ; " all will be familiar, and full of 
significance or beauty. The novel of the 
slums must be written by one who has 
played there as a child, and taken part in 
all its amusements ; not out of curiosity, but 
out of pleasure seeking. It cannot be done 
from above nor from the outside. It must 
be done out of a full heart and without 
seeking for effect. 

The artist should not look abroad to see 
how others are succeeding. Success does 



The Local Novel. 73 

not always measure merit. It took nearly a 
third of a century for Whitman and Monet 
to be recognized. The great artist never 
conforms. He does not trail after some 
other man's success. He works out his 
individual perception of things. 

The contrast of city and country, every- 
where growing sharper, will find its reflec- 
tion in this local novel of the immediate 
future, — the same tragedies and comedies, 
with the essential difference called local 
color, and taking place all over the land, 
wherever cities arise like fungi, unhealthy, 
yet absorbing as subjects of fictional art. 

As I have elsewhere pointed out, the drama 
will join the novel in this study of local 
conditions. It will be derived from fiction, 
and in many cases the dramatist and novelist 
will be the same person. In all cases the 
sincerity of the author's love for his scenes 
and characters will find expression in tender 
care for truth, and there will be made to 
pass before our eyes wonderfully suggestive 
pictures of other lives and landscapes. The 
drama will grow in dignity and importance 
along these lines. 



74 Crumbling Idols. 

Both drama and novel will be colloquial. 
This does not mean that they will be exclu- 
sively in the dialects, but the actual speech 
of the people of each locality will unques- 
tionably be studied more closely than ever 
before. Dialect is the life of a language, 
precisely as the common people of the 
nation form the sustaining power of its 
social life and art. 

And so in the novel, in the short story, 
and in the drama — by the work of a multi- 
tude of loving artists, not by the work of an 
over-topping personality — will the intimate 
social, individual life of the nation be de- 
picted. Before this localism shall pass away, 
such a study will have been made of this 
land and people as has never been made by 
any other age or social group, — a literature 
from the plain people, reflecting their unre- 
strained outlook on life, subtle in speech 
and color, humane beyond precedent, humor- 
ous, varied, simple in means, lucid as water, 
searching as sunlight. 

To one who believes each age to be its 
own best interpreter, the idea of "decay 
of fiction" never comes. That which the 



The Local Novel, 75 

absolutist takes for decay is merely change. 
The conservative fears change ; the radical 
welcomes it. The conservative tries to ar- 
gue that fundamentals cannot change ; that 
they are the same yesterday, to-day, and to- 
morrow. If that were true, then a sorrowful 
outlook on the future would be natural. 
Such permanency would be death. Life 
means change. 

As a matter of fact, the minute differenti- 
ations of literature which the conservative 
calls its non-essentials, are really its essen- 
tials. Vitality and growth are in these " non- 
essentials." It is the difference in characters, 
not their similarity, which is forever interest- 
ing. It is the subtle coloring individuality 
gives which vitalizes landscape art, and so 
it is the subtle differences in the interpre- 
tation of life which each age gives that 
vitalizes its literature and makes it its 
own. 

The individuality of the artist is the saving 
grace of art; and landscape painting will 
not be fantastic so long as men study na- 
ture. It will never be mere reproduction 
so long as the artist represents it as he sees 



76 Crumbling Idols. 

I it. The fact will correct the fantasy. The 
artist will color the fact. 

The business of the present is not to ex- 
press fundamentals, but to sincerely present 
its own minute and characteristic interpre- 
tation of life. This point cannot be too often 
insisted upon. Unless a writer add some- 
thing to the literature of his race, has he jus- 
tification ? Is there glory in imitation ? Is 
the painter greatest who copies old masters, 
or is it more praiseworthy to embody an 
original conception ? These are very impor- 
tant questions for the young artist. 

To perceive the hopelessness of absolutism 
in literature, you have but to stop a moment 
to think. Admit that there are perfect mod- 
els to which must be referred all subsequent 
writing, and we are committed to a barren 
round of hopeless imitations. The young 
writer is disheartened or drawn off into imi- 
tations, and ruined for any real expression. 
This way of looking at literature produced 
our Barlows and Coltons and Hillhouses, 
with their "colossi of cotton-batting," and it 
produces blank-verse dramas to-day. 

But the relativists in art are full of hope. 



The Local Novel. 77 

They see that life is the model, — or, rather, 
that each man stands accountable to himself 
first, and to the perceived fact of life second. 
Life is always changing, and literature 
changes with it. It never decays ; it changes. 
Poetry — that is to say impassio7ied personal 
otitlook on life — is in no more danger of ex- 
tinction to-day than in the days of Edmund 
Spenser. The American novel will continue 
to grow in truth to American life without re- 
gard to the form and spirit of the novel or 
drama of the past. Consciously or uncon- 
sciously, the point of view of the modern 
writer is that of the veritist, or truth stater. 

Once out of the period of tutelage, it is 
natural for youth to overleap barriers. He 
naturally discards the wig and cloak of his 
grandfathers. He comes at last to reject, 
perhaps a little too brusquely, the models 
which conservatism regards with awe. He 
respects them as history, but he has life, 
abounding, fresh, contiguous life ; life that 
stings and smothers and overwhelms and ex- 
alts, like the salt, green, snow-tipped ocean 
surf ; life, with its terrors and triumphs, right 
here and now ; its infinite drama, its allure- 



78 Crumbling Idols. 

ment, its battle, and its victories. Life is 
the model, truth is the master, the heart of 
the man himself his motive power. The 
pleasure of re-creating in the image of na- 
ture is the artist's unfailing reward. 

To him who sees that difference, not simi- 
larity, is the vitalizing quality, there is no 
sorrow at change. The future will take care 
of itself. In the space of that word " differ- 
ence " lies all the infinite range of future art. 
Some elements are comparatively unchang- 
ing. The snow will fall, spring will come, 
men and women love, the stars will rise and 
set, and grass return again and again in 
vast rhythms of green, but society will not 
be the same. 

The physical conformation of our nation 
will change. It will lose its wildness, its 
austerity. Its unpeopled plains will pass 
away, and gardens will bloom where the hot 
sand now drifts. Cities will rise where now 
the elk and the mountain lions are. Swifter 
means of transportation will bring the lives 
of different sections into closer relationship. 
It will tend to equalize intellectual opportuni- 
ties. The physical and mental life of men 



The Local Novel. 79 

and women will be changed, the relation of 
man to man, and man to woman, will change 
in detail, and the fiction of the future will 
express these changes. 

To the veritist, therefore, the present is 
the vital theme. The past is dead, and the 
future can be trusted to look after itself. 
The young men and maidens of that time 
will find the stars of their present brighter 
than the stars of '92, the people around them 
more absorbing than books, and their own 
outlook on life more reasonable than 
that of dead men. Their writing 
and painting, in proportion to 
its vitality and importance, 
will reflect this, their 
natural attitude, to- 
ward life and 
history. 



VII. 

THE DRIFT OF THE DRAMA. 



^jj THE American drama, 

from the earliest time of 

THE DRIFT OF 

Its entry into the colonies, 

THE DRAMA. , . .^ , 

has mtensined and car- 
ried to the farthest absurdity the principle 
of dependence upon other times and coun- 
tries for models. It has reflected at various 
times Shakespeare, Dryden, Bulwer, Schil- 
ler, Sheridan, Scott, and Dickens, not to 
speak of other and unnameable depths of 
imitation. 

Even when impassioned genius rose to the 
delineation of native scenes, no landscape 
was remote enough or wild enough to keep 
out the tender English maiden and the 
villain in top-coat and riding-boots. The 
question of inheritance, the production of 
lost wills, and the final restoration of the 
heroine to her own true lover went on quite 
in the standard British manner. 

Once or twice, however, by the sheer 
force of the subject, conventions were driven 



84 Crumbling Idols. 

out. But these instances simply throw into 
greater contrast the universal sterility of 
invention. 

Ephemeral dramas of Revolutionary times 
and plays of American society, wherein 
the characters were all ticketed as Master 
Lively, Simon Solemn, or Mistress Long 
Tongue, abounded up to 1840; the histor- 
ical dramas of this period were mere spec- 
tacles, and had no literary value of any 
sort. 

Historically, the Civil War marks an 
epoch in the drama, as it does in poetry 
and the novel. It divided the old from the 
new, not in abrupt separation, but with the 
coming of that mighty outburst of national 
passion the old was thrown into pale ob- 
scurity, to linger on for a while, but to 
lose vitality as the New moved inexorably 
forward. 

The border drama seems to have been the 
first decided indication of Americanism in 
the drama. It sprang almost directly from 
the novel of adventure represented by Cooper 
and Bird and Webber, and was equally gory. 
Of this sort was " Tamora " and " Shot in 



l^HE Drift of the Drama. 85 

the Eye." However, the tender, fainting 
maiden and the irreproachable lover were 
always found in even these mid-forest com- 
plications. It had the merit, to be sure, of 
being in prose, and at times approached a 
study of life. 

Later, the novels of Bret Harte and Joa- 
quin Miller gave a higher turn to these 
border dramas, and the Indian took a subor- 
dinate position, the miner and desperado 
holding the centre of the stage. As these 
novels were immensely higher in literary 
style and arrangement, so the dramas mod- 
elled upon them could not entirely escape 
being touched here and there with truth and 
poetry. 

It is a curious consideration that people 
will endure, upon the stage, absurdities which 
would disgust them in the novel. The stage 
has always been conventional, symbolical, at 
its best ; and the swift movement, the glare 
of lights, and the atmosphere of artificiality 
in the decoration, have bewildered the judg- 
ment, and made the very worst melodrama 
disgracefully acceptable to large masses of 
fairly well educated people. 



S6 Crumbling Idols. 

We find, therefore, a public apparently 
willing to pay for the worn-out fashions of 
the novel, sitting with small uneasiness 
before dramatic writing which is below the 
level of even the weekly story papers. 

The ambitious " society plays " are for the 
most part on the level of the " Saturday Eve- 
ning Romancer." Their heroes never appear 
without creases in their trousers, and their 
heroines are actuated by the same character- 
less and flabby sentiment all heroines have 
manifested for centuries ; and the men and 
women of both melodrama and society plays 
appear to be sexually diseased, precisely as in 
the French novel and the cheap story paper. 

Where the technique is better, the outlook 
on life is hopelessly false and pathologic, — 
quite on the model of the satyriasic French 
novelists, who seem to find healthy human 
feeling a bore, and who scent a suggestive 
situation with the nostrils of a vulture. 
Thus, while the American novel has grown 
steadily more truthful and wholesome, the 
drama, with several notable exceptions, has 
kept the low level of imitative English sensa- 
tionalism and sterile French sexualism. 



The Drift of the Drama S7 

While the above statement of the low plane 
of the drama is true in general, there are 
indubitable signs of change, and change for 
the better; and it requires little prophetic 
insight to predict that the drama is soon to 
take its place beside the novel. 

The border drama seems to have lodged 
at last in the ten cent theatres. The EngHsh 
melodrama is a great deal discredited, almost 
rejected. The ephemeral farce-comedy seems 
to be losing its dominion, being superseded 
on the serious side by character comedy, and 
on its amusement side by the comic opera, 
which occasionally really amuses people. 

The one-part play still holds a place on 
the stage, by reason of the survival of the 
" star," but the public is demanding some- 
thing more than a monologue. And one by 
one the one-part plays are discredited and die 
out. The better pubHc demand a play which 
shall present in some sort the proportions of 
art. 

Burlesque seems to have been filling in a 
transition state. When old forms are decay- 
ing, they are always food for the satirists. 
It is not without reason that the farce-comedy 



88 Crumbling Idols. 

writers have held the stage for ten years. 
They had a work to do, and they have done 
it merrily and well. It was their business to 
invalidate the absurd sentiment and false 
action of the old plays. It is a very good 
sign to see an audience laugh heartily when 
the mock heavy villain walks on dragging his 
toes, and smiling sardonically. The burles- 
quer has made the strut and shout of old- 
time tragedy absurd, and has weakened the 
bonds which kept the school-bred American 
enslaved to the idea that Shakespeare and 
the glorious old comedies ended the forms of 
the drama. The burlesquer respects nothing 
but the truth, which he cannot distort. 

There could be no progress, no native out- 
put, so long as the past lay like a brazen 
wall across the way of the young dramatist. 
The free untrodden paths do not lie in the 
direction of the past. Shakespeare and 
Moliere are to be ignored as models, pre- 
cisely as they expressed themselves in youth- 
ful unconcern of ^schylus and Sophocles. 

The undue worship of Shakespeare or any 
other dramatist is fatal to individual creation. 
There can be only one creative model, and 



The Drift of the Drama. 89 

that is life. Truth and sincerity of purpose 
on the part of the writer, if he be of gen- 
uinely creative temper, will lead him to the 
untrod spaces without theory and without 
slavery. 

The American realist should stand for a 
liberated art. If this means emancipation 
from Shakespeare, or Scott, or Hugo, very 
well ; but we should not argue for a change 
of masters. We should condemn with equal 
severity imitation of a living master like 
Ibsen. 

A work of art is an individual thing, — a 
relation of one human soul to life, emotion- 
ally expressed. The artist will find many 
having the same outlook substantially, but 
as an artist he has nothing to do with that. 
His only obligation is to be true to life as it 
seems to him from his personal angle of 
vision. 

It may be said again at this point that the 
past is not vital to the millions of America. 
Critics of the scholastic sort, with their 
natural or acquired conservatism, have half- 
convinced a certain class of Americans 
(small, in relation to sixty millions of people) 



90 Crumbling Idols. 

that there are dramatic gods in the past, 
before whom all intellects and especially 
all creative youth, are to bow down; but 
the great body of American readers rebel 
against such intellectual slavery. It needs 
the illuminating genius of Edwin Booth to 
make "Hamlet" endurable. These facts are 
admitted by the theatre manager, who has 
his uses, after all. With him " Shakespeare 
spells failure." The public prefers " Held 
by the Enemy " and " The Lost Paradise " 
and "Shore Acres" to "Hamlet," — which 
is their privilege. 

This has nothing to do with the great- 
ness of Shakespeare any more than it has 
with the grandeur of .^schylus. It is simply 
proof that neither of these great figures are 
part of our lives to-day. They are educa- 
tional in effect. They illuminate the past 
with marvellous, inestimable light; but the 
sorrows of a child, the story of a struggling, 
hopeless negro, or the parting^ of an old 
Hoosier farmer from his daughter, gets 
closer to us, touches us in a more vital way, 
than the death of Hamlet or the passion of 
Clytemnestra. 



The Drift of the Drama. 91 

A perception of these changes in values is 
necessary to the modern dramatist. Natu- 
rally, if he proceeds upon what he believes 
to be the popular track, without the motive 
which is absolutely necessary for good art, 
of expressing his own individual feeling, he 
must recognize this change of sentiment. 
The feeling of the average man must be 
taken into account, rather than the judgment 
of the pedant. 

It may be sorrowful to the student con- 
servative and to the aristocratic party in 
literature to see old dramatic forms draw 
off, but to others it is a sign of liberty and 
of native new birth. It is as natural as the 
growth of grass. The spontaneous out- 
growth of native art may modify old forms, 
it must not be bound by them. 

The fight is not between Shakespeare and 
Sheridan on one side, and the forces repre- 
sented by Valdes and Ibsen and Howells 
on the other ; it is the immitigable war be- 
tween creative Youth and reminiscent Age. 
It is the rebellious demand of youth for the 
right to utter himself in his own way, with- 
out reference to past models. It is youth 



92 Crumbling Idols. 

facing life and the future over against age 
and aristocracy, clinging to the inheritances 
of the past, and facing certain death. 

Every great group of dramatists in the 
past, every great change in painting, has 
met the same opposition; the same anath- 
emas have been winged, the same warnings 
have been uttered that are now being brought 
against those who refuse to be bound by the 
dramatic models of the past, or by the old 
masters in paint and oil. The veritist ac- 
cepts as a matter of course the opposition 
he meets. 

The promise of change in the drama is 
becoming fulfilment in the rapid rise of the 
local drama, which is following exactly in the 
line marked out by the local novel ; that is 
to say, the best dramas of American life of 
the last ten years have risen from the loyal 
love of the dramatist for certain local phases 
of American life ; and in each case the love 
of subject has aided the dramatist to over- 
ride, in some degree, barren conventions, 
and to produce lifelike groups of characters. 

You have but to run over a few of the 
names to perceive this. " The Old Home- 



The Drift of the Drama. 93 

stead," " Blue Jeans," " The County Fair," 
" Alabama," " Shore Acres," " In Mizzoura," 
etc. 

It must here again be repeated that the 
radical critic often takes interest in some art 
output, not because it is a perfect product, 
a rounded masterpiece in imitation of some 
model, but because it indicates a desire for 
change ; because it prophesies new things. 

He praises "Shore Acres," "Alabama," 
and " In Mizzoura " because they are sig- 
nificant of change from melodrama to native 
character comedy. They are leaves, show- 
ing the set of the current. Where the actu- 
ating motive of the dramatist is to celebrate 
some life he has lived and loved, the tradi- 
tions of the drama count for less ; truth 
counts for more. 

Instances of this are to be seen in Mr. 
Heme's " Shore Acres " and "In Mizzoura," 
by Augustus Thomas. Mr. Heme's " Shore 
Acres " has not only opened a new dispen- 
sation in New England drama, but by its 
great money success will encourage all other 
dramatists working upon local themes. It 
more nearly approaches the delineation of 



94 Crumbling Idols. 

New England life than any other play to 
date. It rises in some scenes nearly to the 
level of Miss Wilkins's stories. 

Veritism is unquestionably acting upon 
the drama as impressionism has already 
transformed painting, and changed the cur- 
rent of literature. Veritism discredits plots 
and formal complications. It deals with life 
face to face, and swiftly and surely and 
always from the individual artist's stand- 
point. Characters and the relation of groups 
of characters are coming to have more value 
than plot. 

When Mr. Howells remarked upon this 
some years ago, the walls of Jericho were 
apparently shaken down, to judge from the 
dust and noise of reverberating explosion. 
Managers, secure in possession of the 
" Crimes of London " and the " Gaslights of 
Paris," turned the American dramatist out 
on the street, through the medium of their 
suave black porters. As several of them 
plainly said, they had no use for American 
dramatists. But to-day every marked and 
continued success on our stage is an Amer- 
ican drama of character, treated with more 
or less of sincerity and truth. 



The Drift of the Drama. 95 

Everywhere the value of truth increases, 
not only from the literary side of the stage, 
but from its commercial side. Mr. Harri- 
gan's character sketches of New York low 
life will be supplemented or superseded by 
character studies of all classes of New York 
society. Mr. Brander Matthews, Mr. Clyde 
Fitch, and Mr. Richard Harding Davis are 
likely to make finished and valuable con- 
tributions to local New York drama. 

Mr. Joel Harris is writing a drama of the 
South. Mr. Cable is reported to be drama- 
tizing one of his novels. Miss Wilkins has 
made a most excellent beginning with " Giles 
Corey." She will do better when she handles 
a modern theme. Without question, the 
local novelists and the local dramatists are 
to be co-workers in future, and the whole 
outlook is very fine and promising. 

Our stage is soon to be filled with the 
most amusing and interesting, because truth- 
ful and most human characters ever grouped 
on any one national stage. Every vitally 
interesting theme will find its dramatists, for 
there is no set law for the form and theme 
of the drama. 



96 Crumbling Idols. 

There is only one law for the dramatist : 
he must interest his audience from start to 
finish. Interest does not mean merely to 
amuse. The stage cannot long remain a 
mere amusement. It must interest and in- 
struct as well, or it will pall upon the public 
palate like a diet of honey or vinegar. Public 
taste changes with great rapidity, making con- 
ditions which seem stable vanish like smoke. 
Less than five years ago we were lost in 
a tumult of English melodrama. Every the- 
atre echoed with the voices of the hero and 
the heavy villain. We seem likely to begin 
the next season practically without the aid 
of cheap English drama, and more and bet- 
ter American plays are promised than at any 
other time in the history of our drama. 

Taste is certainly rising to meet the 
dramatist, who was on the higher levels 
long before the public (or, at least, 
before the manager), waiting impa- 
tiently a chance to put his best 
work before the world. 
His chance seems 
coming at 
last. 



VIII. 



THE INFLUENCE OF IBSEN. 



yjjj IN this transition stage 

THE INFLUENCE ^^^ '^^'^^^ ^^ ^^^'^^ ^^■ 
OF IBSEN. '^^ ^'^ ^^^^^^ *^ ^^^^ 

great significance. No 
doubt there is a good deal of manufactured 
admiration current, but there is enough of 
genuine enthusiasm to make his ideas and 
works an issue. His significance is very- 
great. 

He not only represents a distinctive phase 
of dramatic writing, but he stands (con- 
sciously) for the idea of progress in art. 
He stands for actuality. He is consistently 
and wholly progressive, and may be taken to 
represent the whole movement in dramatic 
art commonly called realism, but which 
might be called "modernism." 

Reahsm, in its true sense, in the sense in 
which the Spanish novelist Valdes uses it, 
and as Mr. Howells uses it, does not mean 
the reproduction in a drama of tanks and 
fire-engines, or real burglars blowing open 



100 Crumbling Idols. 

2l safe. Neither does realism in the novel 
mean the study of murderers, insane or crim- 
inal classes. Realism in its broadest mean- 
ing is simply the idea of perceiving and 
stating the truth in an individual way, irre- 
spective of past models. It is progress in art. 
It does not despise the past, but, on the other 
hand, it does not accept any man or age as 
model. 

Ibsen, the great Norwegian poet and dra- 
matist, having become an issue in the drama, 
the study of his methods is likely to yield good 
results. 

He is a realist first, in his choice of theme. 
He is not content with the themes common 
to dramas. He deals with life, and modern 
life, — primarily with Norwegian life, but 
with the life of other lands secondarily, for 
the reason that his theme is common and 
modern, and his aim truth. The passions, 
situations of his drama, appeal to us as real, 
because they are actuahties of his land and 
time. 

He is modern, in that his domain is one 
upon which no dramatist of the Elizabe- 
than or of the romantic German age has ever 



The Influence of Ibsen. ioi 

trenched. Values in his plays are readjusted 
to suit modern life. He not only treats of 
modern themes, but gives the modern man's 
comment upon them. 

Thus his choice of motive in itself an- 
nounces a widening of the domain of the 
drama. No longer restricted to the cardinal 
passions, — love, fear, hate, jealousy, or re- 
venge, — all emotions, and especially all new, 
distinctively modern and intellectual emo- 
tions, are to be used as basis for the coming 
drama. 

Life is to be depicted, not love-life. Sexual 
attractions and perplexities do not form life, 
but only part of life. Even the old passions 
are taking new forms. Ambition concerns 
itself with new objects, and hate has new 
expressions. Life is in continual process of 
change, and in conformity to these social 
and individual changes the drama always has 
changed and must ever change. 

Ibsen's work not only predicts the im- 
pending change ; it enforces it. His themes 
could not have been used by any other age ; 
in no past age would they have been under- 
stood, — nor are they now, for a vast and 
electric prophecy runs through them all. 



102 Crumbling Idols. 

It is an advanced condition of mind, an 
exceptional mental development that enables 
Ibsen to find poetry and significance in the 
realities of modern life. He was born a 
reformer. His plays are not merely radical 
in theory, they are sections of life, — seg- 
ments, not circles; for nothing begins or 
ends in this world. All is ebb and flow. 
It is only in the romance that things are 
finished, rounded out, and smoothed down. 

His realities are, moreover, common reali- 
ties. Take " The Enemy of Society," for 
example, perhaps the most radical in form 
and subject (dramatically) of all his plays. 
See how small a part the passion of love or 
jealousy plays in it ! See how great a part 
pure intellect plays ! 

The theme is sociological. The treatment 
so magnificently direct and masterly, the 
characterization so honest, we are made to 
feel very near these townsmen whose secret 
feelings and thoughts are being laid bare to 
us. Note what wide representative reach 
has been attained by being faithful to actual 
conditions. It might all have happened at 
Bar Haven or at Boomtown, Nebraska. 
The same lying, booming, robbing goes on 



The Influence of Ibsen. 103 

where the social conditions are similar, the 
same deceits and corruptions ; being true to 
the Norwegian village, he attains the widest 
interest. 

I repeat, he is a realist in his choice of 
subject, because he treats of ideas, emotions, 
and situations new to the drama but common 
to life, and deals with them all in a new way. 
We are done with machinery, fustian, and 
clap-trap as we enter his dramatic world. 
Worn-out themes have no place in the six 
or seven social dramas he has given us. 

How true and unconventional his style. 
We hardly realize how false and stilted cur- 
rent stage-conversation is, till we hear the 
real word spoken there. His words come 
to us at times like thrust of naked fists. 
They shake the hearer with their weight of 
real passion. In one sense this speech is as- 
toundingly direct, and then again it is subtly 
indirect — as in life. Observe how his love- 
making proceeds. How chary of words. 
Only a hint here and there. Its expression 
is left mainly to the tone of the voice, or put 
into the vibrant undertone when talking of 
the weather, or it is dramatized in the face. 



I04 Crumbling Idols. 

For example, see Hovstadt with Petra in 
" The Enemy of Society." As in life, where 
the word " love " means most it is used char- 
ily ; especially is this true among the middle 
classes. On the stage, however, it is so 
common as to lose all significance and 
sacredness. 

Observe also that in the superb reality of 
his plays the soliloquy is lost, that hoary 
monstrosity ; that cheap way of explain- 
ing to the audience what the dramatist had 
not the skill to suggest; that ancient de- 
vice, by which the hero tells the gallery that 
his heart is breaking, while the villain ex- 
plains the plot and unfolds his wickedness ! 
The soliloquy, the stronghold of the con- 
ventional drama, is gone when we enter the 
theatre where Ibsen's later plays are being 
performed. 

Verity demands, also, simplicity of plan. 
Observe this in " The Doll-Home," in 
" Ghosts," in " Rosmersholm." No compli- 
cations, no external intricacies, hardly any- 
thing approaching a plot, the interest de- 
pending entirely upon the characterization 
and the thought. The pursuit and not the 



The Influence of Ibsen. 105 

end, has become (as in the novel) the leading 
motive. 

The plan springs from the characters, and 
unrolls mysteriously, with all the unforeseen 
changes of life itself. Nothing can be fore- 
told any more than in a novel of life. At his 
best he takes a common man or a represen- 
tative man and follows him through a moral 
or mental change, with all his logical con- 
nections, and leaves him as abruptly as he 
began. 

There are no heroines, villains, and heroes 
in these uncompromising dramas. Their race 
is run. The accommodating gentleman v/ho 
keeps things stirred up through four acts in 
order that the hero may display himself, is 
out of business in this modern drama. Krog- 
stadt is the nearest approach to this facto- 
tum, the villain, and he is only a man gone 
wrong, and persecuting, not for love of it, but 
for love of his children, — persecution based 
on the affection of a father and not on lust 
and greed. 

This brings me to one of the greatest dis- 
tinctions of all, and that is the dramatist's 
treatment of motives. One hardly dares 



io6 Crumbling Idols. 

say how much this may come to mean to 
the realist. Nothing shows the great Nor- 
wegian's power of delineation and his love 
for verity and for justice more clearly than 
his treatment of the moving forces of his 
characters. He sees them completely in 
form and dress, speech and motive. They 
are men and women. 

As one reads " Pillars of Society," for 
example, following the study of Bernick, it 
seems at first like a merciless satire, — but 
wait and see ! The drama mounts at length 
into the region of motives. It tells that the 
hypocrite Bernick is himself a product of 
conditions. He has his side of the story, and 
the power to state it well-nigh irresistibly. 
" Perhaps you think I acted from selfish 
motives," Bernick pleads. " If I had stood 
alone, then, I would have begun the world 
again, cheerfully and bravely. But you don't 
understand how the head of a great house 
becomes a living part of the business he 
inherits, with its enormous responsibility. 
Do you know that the weal or woe of 
thousands depends upon him ? " 

LoNA. — It is for the sake of the com- 



The Influence of Ibsen. 107 

munity then, that for these fifteen years you 
have stood upon a lie ? 

Bernick. — A lie? 

LoNA. — I call it the lie, — the threefold 
lie. 

Bernick. — Would you have me sacri- 
fice my domestic happiness and my position 
in society ? 

LoNA. — What right have you to stand 
where you are standing ? 

Bernick. — I 've gained more and more 
right every day for fifteen years, — by all 
I Ve labored for, by my whole life, by all 
I 've won. 

We begin to ponder; we ask ourselves 
whether we would have done better had we 
been in his place. 

Thus each character has, in a sense, his 
justification. We see things from their stand- 
point. The fluent and all-embracing sym- 
pathy of the dramatist has gone around these 
men and women. Malformed and twisted 
as they are, they have always a drainatic 
justification for their action. 

We come now to his dramatic situations, 
where again his faithfulness to fact is shown. 



io8 Crumbling Idols. 

In life, how slight a thing leads to a tragedy ! 
A misapprehension, a feeling of foolish pride, 
a jest, a word or two spoken hastily, — these 
are the causes of many a life-long separation, 
many a tragic sorrow. Considered from the 
stage, how slight is the barrier between Nora 
and Thorvald in "The Doll-Home," but 
how insuperable considered from the stand- 
point of life. 

We have a difference arising between 
the brothers Stockman in " The Enemy of 
Society," — a difference based upon deep 
mental disagreements, upon fundamental 
facts, and which will separate them forever. 

There is something recognizably immiti- 
gable in these terrible moods. They shake 
us, for we recognize our own liability to such 
disasters ; but in the melodrama and the 
romantic play, no matter what happens, we 
remain tranquil. Though the heroine be 
burned at the stake, and the hero thrice set 
upon, we know that through flame and bolt, 
and wastes of sea, in spite of hate and pur- 
chased justice, they will come forth vindi- 
cated and unharmed in the joyous fifth act. 
We know this, and feel about for our over- 
shoes. 



The Influence of Ibsen. 109 

But in the plays of Ibsen we do not find 
ourselves able to predict what changes may 
come, for the reason that the action springs 
from and depends upon the characters. The 
full meaning of this may not appear at first 
sight. To have the action spring from the 
characters is to destroy the traditional plot 
It means to have individuals, not situations. 
It means that this is the farthest present re- 
move from the immitigable doom in ^schy- 
lus, and the fixed complications of Shake- 
spearian comedy. It destroys romantic plots 
and under-plots. 

On the same general principle of verity 
first and effect afterwards, is Ibsen's superb 
treatment of what are called irrelevant char- 
acters, irrelevant incident. He selects cer- 
tain characters for delineation, and then uses 
such others as naturally come into the range 
of his drama; and as the action passes on 
and leaves them behind, they do not reappear. 
They served their purpose and are lost to 
view. 

The dramatist takes two or three life-lines, 
which he holds in his hands, and, like the 
novelist, traces them through the maze of in- 



no Crumbling Idols. 

cident. For example, in " The Doll-Home " 
there are two central figures ; around them 
are changing groups of men and women. 
The hearer or reader feels that these people 
are a part of life, that other men and women 
meet and influence them for a time and pass 
out of their lives. Only the few are in any 
way accounted for at the end. 

This is in accordance with the ideas put 
by Olive Schreiner into that strange and 
powerful preface to " An African Farm " : 

" Human life may be painted according to two 
methods. There is the stage method. Accord- 
ing to that, each character is duly marshalled at 
first and ticketed. We know with an immutable 
certainty that at the right crises each will reap- 
pear, act his part, and when the curtain falls all 
will stand before it bowing. There is a sense of 
satisfaction in this and completeness. But there 
is another method, the method of the life we 
lead. Here nothing can be prophesied. There 
is a strange coming and going of feet. Men 
appear, act, and react upon each other and pass 
away. When the crisis comes, the man who 
would fit it does not appear. When the curtain 
falls, no one is ready. , . . Life may be painted 



The Influence of Ibsen. hi 

according to either method, but the methods 
are different. The canons of criticism that bear 
upon the one, cut cruelly across the other." 

Here is the creed, if creed it may be called, 
of the absolute veritist or realist. Ibsen may 
be criticised, but only with reference to this 
principle of verity. If there is irrelevant 
incident in life, then it does not belong to 
the drama. There are no traditional cri- 
terions by which to judge a man whose aim 
is, not to conform to traditions, but to ignore 
them. 

See the power of an " irrelevant character " 
in Dr. Rank! Apparently unrelated, yet 
what power lies in his coming and going. 
Nothing in the play seemed to me more irre- 
sistibly courageous and true than the hand- 
ling of that modern man. 

But was he irrelevant .? Is he not subtly 
related ? Does he not throw into relief the 
life, the abounding animality, of Thorvald 
and the unthinking happiness of Nora ? He 
seems to me deeply significant as a foil, such 
as we see in daily life, when the dead lie 
silently in the dim room, — 



112 Crumbling Idols. 

" And the summer morning is cool and sweet, 
And we hear the live folk laugh in the street." 

Every character we note closely stands in 
a subtle relation to us in real life, and every 
character which comes naturally into the 
drama of verities has significance. The 
traditional law that it must " help the story 
on " has no significance where the story is 
lost sight of in the development of character, 
where the pursuit and not the end is the first 
consideration, as with the realist. 

On the score of pure modernness, original- 
ity, and truth, both in subject and method, 
I am incHned to put " The Enemy of Soci- 
ety " at the head of the dramas I have read 
of the great Norwegian. It is the most mod- 
ern, the most unconventional, the most radi- 
cal, and, to me, one of the most powerful 
dramas ever written. Love plays in it but 
the small part it should ; other ideas and 
emotions absorb us. Like a section of life, 
it has no beginning and no end. It has no 
machinery, and nothing is forced. It is as 
modern as the telephone. 

" Yes, and as lacking in beauty," says 
some one. " To j^//," I reply ; " to me it 



The Influence of Ibsen. 113 

has something that is higher than beauty; ^ 
it has truth." 

Using the same criterion, life, we see that 
" The Pillars of Society " is not quite so mod- 
ern. It has a little of the machinery of the 
stage left. Things happen here and there, 
but it is powerfully unconventional, for all 
that. It is filled with superb living figures, 
and the treatment of Bernick is beyond 
praise. A powerful satire, it does not fail 
of doing justice to each figure. 

Finally, Ibsen's treatment of woman stamps 
his radical departure from old standards more 
clearly, perhaps, than any other point. The 
feudalistic woman has been for centuries 
either a sovereign or a servant, a heroine or 
a drudge. In the ordinary drama she is long- 
suffering, patient, and beautiful, or is pretty 
and provokes laughter. 

Predominantly, from the days of Edmund 
Spenser to the last issue of the dime novel, 
the heroine has been characterless, colorless, 
and passive. In the romantic drama she 
has languished in dungeons, been the pas- 
sive subject of duels and abductions, cal- 
umny, and reproach. She has been deceived, 
8 



114 Crumbling Idols. 

driven from home, cheated of her inheritance, 
schemed for by villains, and rescued by he- 
roes, while gazing with big round eyes at 
the world which was a chaos of crime and 
wickedness. Her bodily allurements have 
been harped upon and exaggerated till she 
has imagined the whole world eager to pos- 
sess her, warring only for her. It is impos- 
sible to estimate the harm this sort of lying 
has produced. 

To pass from such an atmosphere to that 
of Ibsen's plays is like going from a ques- 
tionable ballroom, filled with painted and 
simpering faces, out into the crisp bracing 
air of the street, filled with healthy and vigo- 
rous men and women ; like going into a home 
where man and wife, equal in fact as in law, 
are discussing the questions of the day with 
a party of valued friends. And yet in the 
feudalistic picture there was once large ele- 
ment of truth. It is no longer true ; it should 
be discarded. A new woman has appeared 
in life. 

Dramatically, Ibsen's women are centres 
of action; not passive dramatic "bones of 
contention," but active agents in their turn. 



The Influence of Ibsen. 115 

Indeed, they take the play in their own hands t^' 
at times. They re-act upon men, they rise 
above men at times in the perception of jus- 
tice, of absolute ethics ; they are out in the 
world, the men's world. They may not un- 
derstand it very well, but they are at least in 
it, and having their opinion upon things, and 
voicing their emotions. They are out of the 1 
unhealthy air of the feudalistic romance, so / 
much is certain, so much is gain. They are 
grappling, not merely with affairs, but with ^ 
social problems. 

My criticism of Ibsen in this particular is 
again on the score of reality. In his rebound 
from the false and degrading pictures of 
women as having but one life, love-life, he 
has, in my estimation, used too large a pro- ^ 
portion of remarkable women to be perfectly ! 
true to his time and country ; and in order 
to emphasize the growing power and expand- 
ing individuality of the modern woman, he 
has once or twice included the improbable, if 
not the impossible, in the action of his women. 

There is also a strain of morbid psychol- 
ogy in many of his characters which I do 
not value. I prefer his studies of more com- 



ii6 Crumbling Idols. 

mon phases of modern intellectual life. Yet 
the whole outcome of even these studies of 
morbid conditions is helpful, fine, and strong, 
and he does not lose his grasp on surround- 
ing facts, when studying these special cases. 

It is a trite saying that the sense of humor 
is a " saving grace." This element is not 
lacking in Ibsen, but it is not so well devel- 
oped as to give that peculiar touch of saving 
grace. There is a plenty of grim humor, but 
there is little of kindly humor in his plays. 
He is kept from being extravagant not by the 
sense of the ridiculous so much as by sheer 
intellect and deep vibrant sympathy. The 
humor that is everywhere a corrective in the 
fervid sympathy and burning social discon- 
tent of Mr. Howells's later novels is not 
found in Ibsen ; and, lacking it, " The Doll- 
Home " lacks the fine poise a humorous sense 
of human frailties gives to a serious work of 
fiction. 

One closes a reading of these astounding 
dramas with the consciousness that some- 
thing electric has passed by. They stand so 
sheer above most of the dramas of the age 
that it is no wonder the critics are amazed 



The Influence of Ibsen. 117 

and enraged. The person who comes to like 
these dramas and their methods is likely to 
find his taste for conventional heroics dis- 
turbed, if not destroyed. The romantic ab- 
surdities of the day cannot flourish long in 
the same atmosphere. Ibsen is a great her- / 
aid, his dramas lead to the future. ' 

Observe, I do not claim for him superhu- 
man merit. These plays are not the farther 
wall. They are not yet on a plane with the 
great novels of the day. Their purpose is 
too obvious, but they are a superb advance. ( 
Ibsen already sees the beauty and signifi- 
cance of the common life of the day. He 
begins to recognize no such thing as " com- - 
monplace." He exemplifies the magnificent 
sayings of Tolstoy, Valdes, and Whitman, all 
using almost the same words. 

"In nature there is nothing either great 
or small, all is equal. All is equally great, 
equally just, equally beautiful. To talk of 
the trifles of life is not posssible to him who 
has meditated on the great problem of exist- 
ence. The trifle does not exist absolutely, - 
only as a relative term. That which is a 
trifle to some is a great fact to others. In 



ii8 Crumbling Idols. 

all that is particular we may be shown the 
general, in all that is finite the infinite. Art 
is charged with its revelation." 

Realism is not a theory, it is a condition 
of mind, of sensibility. The realist has only 
one law, to be true to himself ; only one crite- 
rion, life. He must love genuinely what he 
depicts, and be true. Anything that he loves, 
the artist will make important to others as to 
himself. He must not be discouraged if the 
general public does not love the same fact as 
himself. He will find sympathizers at last. 

If there is one great idea dominant in the 
present age, it is this : " Art is not the repro- 
duction of art ; each epoch must have its own 
art." Each age writes, paints, sings of its 
own time and for its time. All genuine mod- 
ern art must conform to this general and in- 
exorable law. 
Ibsen has helped us in our war against 
conventionalisms, but he must not domi- 
nate us. His plays are not to 
be models. Our drama will 
be more human, more 
wholesome, and more 
humorous. 



IX. 



IMPRESSIONISM. 



EVERY competent 
observer who passed 

IMPRESSIONISM. , , , 

through the art palace 
at the Exposition was probably made aware 
of the immense growth of impressionistic 
or open-air painting. If the Exposition had 
been held five years ago, scarcely a trace of 
the blue-shadow idea would have been seen 
outside the work of Claude Monet, Pisarro, 
and a few others of the French and Spanish 
groups. 

To-day, as seen in this wonderful collection, 
impressionism as a principle has affected the 
younger men of Russia, Norway, Sweden, 
Denmark, and America as well as the plain 
air school of Giverney. Its presence is put 
in evidence to the ordinary observer in the 
prevalence of blue or purple shadows, and 
by the abundance of dazzling sun-light 
effects. 

This growth of an idea in painting must 
not be confounded with a mere vogue. It 



122 Crumbling Idols. 

is evolutionary, if not destructive, in the eyes 
of the old-school painters, at least. To the 
younger men it assumes almost as much 
importance as the law of gravity. With 
them it is the true law of light and shade. 

It may be worth while to consider, quite 
apart from technical terms, the principles 
upon which this startling departure from the 
conventional manner is based. 

The fundamental idea of the impression- 
ists, as I understand it, is that a picture 
should be a unified impression. It should 
not be a mosaic, but a complete and of course 
momentary concept of the sense of sight. 
It should not deal with the concepts of other 
senses (as touch), nor with judgments ; it 
should be the stayed and reproduced effect 
of a single section of the world of color upon 
the eye. It should not be a number of 
pictures enclosed in one frame, but a single 
idea impossible of subdivision without loss. 

They therefore strive to represent in color 
an instantaneous effect of light and shade 
as presented by nature, and they work in the 
open air necessarily. They are concerned 
with atmosphere always. They know that 



Impressionism. i 23 

the landscape is never twice alike. Every 
degree of the progress of the sun makes a new 
picture. They follow the most splendid and 
alluring phases of nature, putting forth 
almost superhuman effort to catch impres- 
sions of delight under which they quiver. 

They select some moment, some centre of 
interest, — generally of the simplest character. 
This central object they work out with great 
care, but all else fades away into subordinate 
blur of color, precisely as in life. We look 
at a sheep, for example, feeding under a 
tree. We see the sheep with great clearness, 
and the tree and the stump, but the fence 
and hill outside the primary circle of vision 
are only obscurely perceived. The meadow 
beyond is a mere blur of yellow-green. This 
is the natural arrangement. If we look at 
the fence or the meadow, another picture is 
born. 

It will thus be seen that these men are 
veritists in the best sense of the word. 
They are referring constantly to nature. If 
you look carefully at the Dutch painters and 
the English painters of related thought, you 
will find them working out each part of the 



124 Crumbling Idols. 

picture with almost the same clearness. 
Their canvases are not single pictures, they 
are mosaics of pictures, packed into one 
frame. Values are almost equal everywhere. 

This idea of impressionism makes much of 
the relation and interplay of light and shade, 
— not in black and white, but in color. Im- 
pressionists are, above all, colorists. They 
cannot sacrifice color for multiple lines. 
They do not paint leaves, they paint masses 
of color ; they paint the effect of leaves upon 
the eye. 

They teach that the retina perceives only 
plane surfaces. The eye takes note, in its 
primary impressions, of masses rather than 
lines. This idea affects the painting of 
groups; and the most advanced painter 
never loses the unity of light effects, no 
matter how tempting a subject may be, nor 
how complex. 

This may be illustrated by reference to a 
picture exhibited in the Norwegian section, — 
" The First Communion." The scene is the 
sitting or dining room of a well-to-do family. 
It is lighted by a single hanging-lamp. The 
family stand in a semi-circle against the wall. 



^I^=^^E?^BBS 



Impressionism. \ 2 5 

The minister stands silhouetted against the 
light of the lamp. He is the principal figure 
of the group, and yet, because truth demanded 
his position there, he remains a shadow, — 
but a luminous shadow, kindly, dignified, and 
authoritative. 

The lamp casts ^blue-green and orange 
streaks and blurs of color across the table, 
and over the white shirts and collars. Some 
of the faces are vague masses of light, won- 
derfully full of character. Few faces are 
outhned definitely. The whole is simply a 
splendid and solemn impression, as if in 
passing by in the darkness one had caught, 
through an open door, a glance at a hushed 
and reverential communion ceremony. It is 
like Dagnan-Bouveret with better color. 

Without pointing out, as one might, con- 
spicuous examples of the literal delineation 
of groups (in the American section as well 
as elsewhere), I would call attention to the 
fact that this is the modern picture. It is 
also the dramatic picture, because it takes up 
and relates at a stroke the impression of a 
dramatic moment. The mosaic is the un- 
true picture because the eye never sees all 



126 Crumbling Idols. 

faces with equal clearness, especially at a 
moment of dramatic interest. 

This singleness of impression destroys, of 
course, all idea of " cooked up " pictures, as 
the artists say. There are, moreover, no 
ornate or balanced effects. The painter takes 
a swift glance at a hill-side, whose sky-line 
cuts the picture diagonally, perhaps. It has 
a wind-blown tuft of trees upon it, possibly. 
A brook comes into the foreground casually. 
Or he takes for subject a hay-stack in a 
field, painting it for the variant effects of 
sun-light. He finds his heart's-full of beauty 
and mystery in a bit of a meadow with a row 
of willows. 

He takes intimate views of nature ; but if 
he painted the heart of the Andes, he would 
do it, not as the civil engineer sees it, but as 
he himself sees it and loves it. 

The second principle, and the one most 
likely to be perceived by the casual observer, 
is the use of " raw " colors. The impres- 
sionist does not believe nature needs toning 
or harmonizing. Her colors, he finds, are 
primary, and are laid on in juxtaposition. 
Therefore the impressionist does not mix 



iMPRESsroNrsM. 127 

his paints upon his palette. He paints with 
nature's colors, — red, blue, and yellow ; and 
he places them fearlessly on the canvas side 
by side, leaving the eye to mix them, as in 
nature. 

For example, the late Dennis M. Bunker, 
in painting a meadow stream, did not hesitate 
to paint the water blue as the sky, nor to 
paint the red band of rust-like silt on the 
margin of the stream in close juxtaposition 
to the vivid green of the meadow grass. This 
picture, beside a Dutch or English conven- 
tional landscape, was as radically different, as 
radiantly beautiful, as a sunlit day in New 
England June put over against a dull day 
on the low-lands of the North Sea ; and 
this is right. The painter was not account- 
able to the Dutch or English or French 
painters of any time or place ; he was 
accountable only to nature and to his own 
sense. 

This placing of red, blue, and yellow side 
by side gives a crispness and brilliancy, and 
a peculiar vibratory quality to sky and earth 
which is unknown to the old method. And 
if the observer will forget conventions and 



128 Crumbling Idols. 

will refer the canvas back to nature instead, 
he will find this to be the true concept. 

I once asked a keen lover of nature who 
knew nothing about painting, to visit a gal- 
lery with me and see some impressionistic 
works which had shocked the city. I asked 
him to stand before these pictures and tell 
me just what he thought of them. 

He looked long and earnestly, and then 
turned with an enthusiastic light in his eyes, 
" That is June grass under the sunlight." 

His eyes had not been educated to despise 
the vigor and splendor of nature. He cared 
nothing for Corot or Constable or Turner. I 
believe that the unspoiled perception of a 
lover of untempered nature will find in the 
pictures of the best impressionists the quality 
he calls " natural." 

To most eyes the sign-manual of the im- 
pressionist is the blue shadow. And it must 
be admitted that too many impressionists 
have painted as if the blue shadow were 
the only distinguishing sign of the difference 
between the new and the old. The gallery- 
trotter, with eyes filled with dead and buried 
symbolisms of nature, comes upon Bunker's 



Impressionism. i 29 

meadows, or Binding's mountain-tops, or Lar- 
son's sunsets, and exclaims, "Oh, see those 
dreadful pictures ! Where did they get such 
colors." 

To see these colors is a development. In 
my own case, I may confess, I got my first 
idea of colored shadows from reading one of 
Herbert Spencer's essays ten years ago. I 
then came to see blue and grape-color in the 
shadows on the snow. By turning my head 
top-side down, I came to see that shadows 
falling upon yellow sand were violet, and 
the shadows of vivid sunlight falling on the 
white of a macadamized street were blue, 
like the shadows on snows. 

Being so instructed, I came to catch 
through the corners of my eyes sudden 
glimpses of a radiant world which vanished 
as magically as it came. On my horse I 
caught glimpses of this marvellous land of 
color as I galloped across some bridge. In 
this world stone-walls were no longer cold 
gray, they were warm purple, deepening as 
the sun westered. And so the landscape grew 
radiant year by year, until at last no painter's 
impression surpassed my world in beauty. 
9 



130 Crumbling Idols. 

As I write this, I have just come in from 
a bee-hunt over Wisconsin hills, amid splen- 
dors which would make Monet seem low- 
keyed. Only Enneking and some few others 
of the American artists, and some of the 
Norwegians have touched the degree of 
brilliancy and sparkle of color which was in 
the world to-day. Amid bright orange foli- 
age, the trunks of beeches glowed with steel- 
blue shadows on their eastern side. Sumach 
flamed with marvellous brilliancy among 
deep cool green grasses and low plants 
untouched by frost. Everywhere amid the 
red and orange and crimson were lilac and 
steel-blue shadows, giving depth and vigor 
and buoyancy which Corot never saw (or 
never painted), — a world which Inness does 
not represent. Enneking comes nearer, but 
even he tones unconsciously the sparkle of 
these colors. 

Going from this world of frank color to 
the timid apologies and harmonies of the old- 
school painters is depressing. Never again 
can I find them more than mere third-hand 
removes of nature. The Norwegians come 
nearer to seeing nature as I see it than any 



Impression-ism. 131 

other nationality. Their climate must be 
somewhat similar to that in which my life 
has been spent, but they evidently have 
more orange in their sunlight. 

The point to be made here is this, the 
atmosphere and coloring of Russia is not 
the atmosphere of Holland. The atmos- 
phere of Norway is much clearer and the 
colors more vivid than in England. One 
school therefore cannot copy or be based 
upon the other without loss. Each painter 
should paint his own surroundings, with 
nature for his teacher, rather than some 
Dutch master, painting the never-ending 
mists and rains of the sea-level. 

This brings me to my settled conviction 
that art, to be vital, must be local in its sub- 
ject ; its universal appeal must be in its work- 
ing out, — in the way it is done. Dependence 
upon the English or French groups is alike 
fatal to fresh, individual art. 

The impressionist is not only a local 
painter, in choice of subject he deals with 
the present. The impressionist is not an 
historical painter, he takes little interest in 
the monks and brigands of the Middle Ages. 



132 Crumbling Idols. 

He does not feel that America is without 
subjects to paint because she has no castles 
and donjon keeps. He loves nature, not 
history. His attitude toward nature is a per- 
sonal one. He represents the escape from 
childish love of war and the glitter of steel. 

The impressionist paints portraits and 
groups, but paints them as he sees them, 
not as others see them. He has no receipt 
for " flesh color." He never sees human 
flesh unrelated in its color, it is always af- 
fected by other colors. He paints the yel- 
low hair of a child with red, blue, and yellow, 
the gray hair of the grandmother with the 
same primary colors, and attains such truth 
and vigor that the portraits made with 
brown shadows seem dull and flat. Observe 
some of the portraits by Bunker, by Zorn, by 
Bertha Wegmann and Mrs. Perry, or the 
figures in firelight by Benson or Tarbell, and 
you find them all subtle studies of the inter- 
play of color, with no hard and fast line 
between colors. The face gives to the dress, 
the dress to the face. 

True, these pictures are not calculated for 
study with a magnifying glass. Meissonier 



Impressionism. i 3 3 

and Detaille always seem to me to partake 
of the art which carves a coach-and-four out 
of walnuts ; and there are a great many esti- 
mable folk who think paintings are to be 
smelled of, in order to test their quality. 
Everything is not worked out in these im- 
pressionist groups ; there is the suggestion of 
a true impression in their technical handling. 

Their work is not hasty, however. It is 
the result of hard study. They work rapidly, 
but not carelessly. They are like skilled 
musicians ; the actual working out of the 
melody is rapid, but it has taken vast study 
and practice. Lines are few, colors simple, 
but they are marvellously exact. It must 
never be forgotten that they are not delineat- 
ing a scene; they are painting a personal 
impression of a scene, which is vastly 
different. 

The impressionist does not paint Cherubs 
and Loves and floating iron chains. He has 
no conventional pictures, full of impossible 
juxtapositions. He takes fresh, vital themes, 
mainly out-of-door scenes. He aims always 
at freshness and vigor. 

The impressionist is a buoyant and cheer- 



134 Crumbling Idols. 

ful painter. He loves the open air, and the 
mid-day sun. He has little to say about the 
" mystery " and " sentiment " of nature. 
His landscapes quiver with virile color. 
He emphasizes (too often over-emphasizes) 
his difference in method, by choosing the 
most gorgeous subjects. At his worst, the 
impressionist is daring in his choice of sub- 
ject and over-assertive in his handling. Nat- 
urally, in his reaction he has swung back 
across the line too far. 

This leads Monet to paint the same hay- 
stack in twenty different lights, in order to 
emphasize the value of color and atmos- 
phere over mere subject. It leads Dodge 
McKnight to paint water "till it looks as if 
skinned," as one critic said. It led Bunker 
to paint the radiant meadows of June, and 
leads Remington to paint the hot hollows 
between hills of yellow sand, over which a 
cobalt, cloudless sky arches. 

The impressionist, if he is frank, admits the 
value, historically, of the older painters, but 
also says candidly, " They do not represent 
me." I walked through the loan exhibition 
with a man who cared nothing for precedent, 



Impressionism. 135 

— a keen, candid man ; and I afterward 
visited the entire gallery with a painter, — a 
strong and earnest man, who had grown out 
of the gray-black-and-brown method. 

Both these men shook their heads at 
Inness, Diaz, Corot, Troyon, Rousseau, and 
Millet. The painter said, a little sadly, as 
if surrendering an illusion, " They do not 
represent nature to me any more. They 're 
all too indefinite, too weak, too lifeless in 
shadow. They reproduce beautifully, but 
their color is too muddy and cold." 

The other man was not even sad. He 
said, "I don't like them, — that's all there 
is about it. I don't see nature that way. 
Some of them are decorative, but they are 
not nature. I prefer Monet or Hassam or 
the Norwegians." 

As for me, these paintings have no power 
or influence on my life, other than to make 
me feel once more the inexorable march of 
art. I respect these men, — they were such 
deep and tender souls ! They worked so 
hard and so long to embody their conception 
of nature, but they do not represent me, do 
not embody the sunlight and shadow I see. 



136 Crumbling Idols. 

They conceived too much, they saw too 
little. The work of a man like Enneking or 
Steele or Remington, striving to paint native 
scenes, and succeeding, is of more interest 
to me than Diaz. 

It is blind fetichism, timid provincialism, 
or commercial greed which puts the works 
of " the masters " above the living, breathing 
artist. Such is the power of authority that 
people who feel no answering thrill from 
some smooth, dim old paintings are afraid 
to say they do not care for them for fear 
some one will charge them with stupidity or 
ignorance. 

The time is coming when the tyranny of 
such criticism will be overthrown. There is 
no exclusive patent on painting. There are 
just as faithful artists to-day as ever lived, 
and much more truthful than any past age 
could have been. Day by day the old sinks 
an inch. The same questions face the painter 
that face the novelist or the sculptor. Has 
the last word been said .? Did the masters 
utter the last word ? Are there no new king- 
doms of art ? It is the age-worn demand of 
the old that the new shall conform. 



Impressionism. 137 

The old masters saw nature in a certain 
way, — right or wrong it does not matter; 
youth must conform. They saw nature in 
a sombre fashion, therefore youth must be 
decorous. Youth, in impressionism, to-day 
is saying, " I have nothing to do with Con- 
stable or Turner. Their success or failure 
is nothing to me, as an artist. It is my own 
impression of nature I am to paint, not theirs. 
I am to be held accountable to nature, not to 
the painters of a half-century ago. 

" If I see plum-colored shadows on the 
snow, or violet shadows on the sand ; if the 
clouds seen above perpendicular cliffs seem 
on edge ; if a town on a hill in a wild wind 
seems to lean, then I am to paint it so. I 
am painting my love for nature, not some 
other's perception. If this is iconoclasm, I 
cannot help it." 

Very similarly, the tyranny of the classic 
in sculpture is giving way, and America is 
beginning to do the work she can do best. 
Very probably, sculpture will yet embody 
in stone and bronze the scenes we all love in 
American life. John Rogers, in his timid 
way, pointed the way after all. Lanceray, 



138 Crumbling Idols. 

the Russian sculptor, won great fame by em- 
bodying, in a way never before realized, the 
habits and dress of his native land. Theat- 
rical at times, but accurate and swift and 
unified always, he certainly has demonstrated 
that a mighty future exists for sculpture, once 
the tyranny of the Greek is overthrown. 

There are few limitations to sculpture. 
Whatever the artist loves and wishes to put 
into bronze or marble, that is allowable. All 
things point toward genre sculpture, colored 
to the life, not conventionally painted, as in 
Greek art, when sculpture was but just de- 
tached from architecture. Wherever the 
freed soul of the sculptor loves most, there 
will his eager hand create in the image of 
his passion. 

Our wild animals have already found a 
great artist in Kemeys. The Indian and 
the negro also are being spiritedly handled, 
but the workman in his working clothes, the 
brakeman, the thresher on the farm, the heater 
at the furnace, the cow-boy on his horse, the 
young man in the haying field, offer equally 
powerful and characteristic subjects. There 
are no traditional limitations to sculpture. 



Impressionism. 139 

Whatever the sculptor loves and desires to 
fashion, that is his best possible subject. 

The iconoclast is a necessity. He it is 
who breaks out of the hopeless circle of tra- 
ditional authority. His declaration of inde- 
pendence is a disturbance to those who sleep 
on the bosom of the dead prophets. The 
impressionist is unquestionably an iconoclast, 
and the friends of the dead painters are prop- 
erly alarmed. Here, as everywhere, there are 
the two parties, — the one standing for the 
old, the other welcoming the new. A con- 
test like that between realism and romanti- 
cism is not playful, it is destructive. 

To a man educated in the school of Mu- 
nich, the pictures, both of the Norwegians and 
of the Giverney group of Frenchmen and all 
other pictures with blue and purple shadows, 
are a shock. They are not merely variants, 
they are flags of anarchy ; they leave no 
middle ground, apparently. If they are right, 
then all the rest are wrong. By contrast the 
old is slain. 

Not merely this, but to the connoisseur who 
believes that Corot, Rousseau, or Millet 



I40 Crumbling Idols. 

touched the highest point of painting, these 
impressionists are intruders, " they come in 
unbidden ; they are ribald when they are not 
absurd." It is the same old fight between 
authority and youth, between the individual 
and the mass. " We do not welcome change, 
we conservatives. It discredits our masters 
and confuses us with regard to works we 
have considered to be mountain-peaks of 
endeavor." 

As a matter of fact, they are justified in 
taking a serious view of the situation. The 
change in method indicated by vivid and 
fearless coloring, indicates a radical change 
in attitude toward the physical universe. It 
stands for an advance in the perceptive power 
of the human eye. Mercifully, for youth, 
the world of humankind and physical nature 
forever offers new phases for discovery, for 
a new work of art ; just as new subtleties of 
force lure minds like Edison's into the shadow, 
so to the young and unfettered artists new 
worlds of art beckon. 

Let the critic who thinks this a vogue or 
fad, this impressionist view of nature, beware. 
It is a discovery, born of clearer vision and 



Impressionism. 141 

more careful study, — a perception which 
was denied the early painters, precisely as the 
force we call electricity was an ungovernable 
power a generation ago. 

The dead must give way to the living. It 
may be sad, but it is the inexorable law, and 
the veritist and the impressionist will try to 
submit gracefully to the method of the icono- 
clasts who shall come when they in their 
turn are old and sad. 

For the impressionists rank themselves 
with those who believe the final word will 
never be spoken upon art. That they have 
added a new word to painting, no competent 
critic will deny. It has made nature more 
radiantly beautiful, this new word. Like the 
word of a lover, it has exalted the painter to 
see nature irradiated with splendor never seen 
before. Wherever it is most originally worked 
out, it makes use of a fundamental principle 
in an individual way, and it has brought 
painting abreast of the unprejudiced 
perception of the lover of na- 
ture. The principle is as 
broad as air, its work- 
ing out should be 
individual. 



X. 



LITERARY CENTRES. 



X. A FAVORITE pro- 

LITERARY CENTRES. Position with the 
business-man of the 
West is this : " If the West had been settled 
first, the East would be a wilderness to-day, 
for the reason (as he goes on to explain) that 
the fertile soil, the vast cities, the ease of 
communication of the midland, would have 
made it the home of all ease, refinement, 
culture, and art. The East would have been 
only a fringe of seaport towns, with fine 
shooting and fishing lands as a background." 
If he happens to be a business-man with 
an imagination (there are such), he will then 
say : " The East has therefore had its day as 
a commercial centre. The West has finally 
been discovered. The East has poured its 
millions of men and money into the Missis- 
sippi valley, and these millions of men have 
taken root in the soil ; and to-day, in the year 
of 1894, the commercial dominance of the 
East is distinctly on the wane. Henceforth, 
10 



146 Crumbling Idols. 

the centre of commercial activity in the 
United States is to be the West. Hence- 
forth, when men of the Old World speak of 
America, they will not think of Boston and 
New York and Philadelphia, they will mean 
Chicago and the Mississippi valley." 

There is, of course, an element of exagger- 
ation in this, but there is also in it a larger 
truth and a magnificent enthusiasm, — an 
enthusiasm which rises above commercial 
considerations. The man who really dares 
to face the future, — and, of course, the man 
who dares to face the future is he who finds 
his interests served by it, — the man who can 
sit down and think of the on-coming millions 
of the great Mississippi valley, must admit 
that over-statement of its importance is quite 
impossible, given time enough for fulfilment. 

Commercially, the West rushes toward the 
future. Cities rise with velocity hitherto 
inconceivable. True, they are mushrooms 
to some extent, and are founded upon greed 
and speculation to a sorrowful extent; but 
the people are coming on after all, people of 
higher wisdom and purer life, who will make 
these mushroom cities temples to art and 



Literary Centres. 147 

song. This great basin, like Egypt, like Ger- 
many, is to be a " well of nations." It will con- 
tinually revivify and reinvigorate the East, 
the extreme North, and the extreme South. 
It will be the base of food supply ; the heart 
of the nation ; the place of interchange. 

This leads me to a proposition, which I 
make on my own account. Literary horizons 
also are changing with almost equal swift- 
ness. Centres of art production are moving 
westward ; that is to say, the literary supre- 
macy of the East is passing away. There are 
other and subtler causes than commercial 
elements at work. Racial influences are at 
work, and changes in literary and social 
ideals are hastening a far-reaching subdivi- 
sion, if not decentralization, of pov/er. 

In the West there is coming into expression 
and literary influence the great Scandinavian 
and Germanic element to which the tradi- 
tions of English literature are very weak and 
unimportant, and to whom Boston and New 
York are of small account. They have 
their own race-traditions which neutralize 
those of the English language which they 
speak, and thus their minds are left free to 



148 Crumbling Idols. 

^ choose the most modern things. It is im- 
possible for them to take on the literary 
traditions of their adopted tongue with equal 
power, and they find their own less binding 
by change. 

Again, literary traditions are weakening 
all along the line. The old is passing away, 
the new is coming on. As the old fades 
away, the strongholds of tradition and classic 
interest are forgotten and left behind. This 
mighty change is a silent one, but it is irresis- 
tible. This can be illustrated in the change 
which has swept over Boston, Concord, and 
Cambridge during the last ten or twenty 
years. 

Boston has claimed and held supremacy 
in American literature for more than half 
a century. Made illustrious by Emerson, 
Hawthorne, Whittier, Longfellow, Holmes, 
Lowell, the New England group, it easily 
kept its place as the most important literary 
centre in America. New York was second, 
and Philadelphia third. This Cambridge 
group has been called "the polite group" 
and "the Library group." Its members took 
' things for the most part at second hand. 



Literary Centres 149 

They read many books, and mainly wrote 
gentle and polite poems on books and events. 
Whittier and Hawthorne, notwithstanding 
their larger originality, were, after all, related. 
They took things in a bookish way. It 
would be absurd to say they were weak or 
poor, they were very high and noble ; but 
they belonged to another period. They were 
more closely allied with the past, with Eng- 
lish traditions, than we, and were actuated 
by different ideals of life. 

So long as this group lived, Boston was 
the literary autocrat of the nation. But the 
school of book-poets is losing power. And, 
with the change in literary creed, Boston has 
lost its high place, and it is but natural that 
she should now take a rather mournful view 
of American literature. 

New York to-day claims to be, and is, the 
literary centre of America. Boston artists 
one by one go to New York. Literary men 
find their market growing there, and dying 
out in Boston. They find quicker and 
warmer appreciation in New York, and the 
critical atmosphere more hospitable. The 
present receives a larger share of attention 



I50 Crumbling Idols. 

than in Boston. Henceforward New York, 
and not Boston, is to be the great dictator 
of American literature. New York already 
assumes to be able to make or break a novel- 
ist or playwright. Certainly it is the centre 
of magazine production ; and the magazine is, 
on the whole, the greatest outlet for distinc- 
tive American art. 

We are more American in our illustrating 
and in our fiction than in any other lines of 
artistic work. New York is the centre of 
oil-painting as well as of illustration, and its 
markets exceed those of almost all other 
American cities taken together. In short, 
its supremacy in art must be conceded to be 
as complete to-day as its commercial domi- 
nation in railways and stocks. 

And yet New York is in danger of assum- 
ing too much. She must not forget that 
the writers and painters who make her illus- 
trious are very largely products of the South 
and West. One needs but to run over the 
list of the leading magazine-writers of the 
last ten years, to see how true this is. Ohio 
sends William D. Howells; Virginia sends 
Thomas Nelson Page and Am^lie Rives ; 



Literary Centres. 151 

Indiana sends Edward Eggleston, James 
Whitcomb Riley, Mrs. Cathervvood. Ten- 
nessee is represented by the Murfree sisters. 
Georgia, by Joel Harris and Richard Malcolm 
Johnston. Louisiana finds voice through 
George W. Cable and Ruth McEnnery 
Stuart. Arkansas and Kentucky are repre- 
sented by Alice French and James Lane 
Allen ; and so through a notable list. These 
are but a few of the best known of the 
names. Thus, every part of the West or 
South is represented in the Hterary domina- 
tion of New York. 

It is not so much a victory of New York 
over Boston, it is the rising to literary power 
of the whole nation. New York is but the 
trumpet through which the whole nation is 
at last speaking. Let New York remember 
this and be humble, for the same causes that 
have cut away the pride of Boston will cer- 
tainly bring about a corresponding change 
in the relation of New York to the South 
and West. 

It was easy for Boston to maintain her 
literary supremacy while the whole popula- 
tion of the nation was less than forty mil- 



152 Crumbling Idols. 

lions, when the whole West was a frontier, 
and the South was a slave-country. It will 
be hard for New York to retain her present 
supremacy with a nation of seventy millions 
of people, with cities containing half a 
million people springing up in the interior 
and on the Western sea, — not to mention 
Chicago, whose shadow already menaces 
New York. 

Already Chicago claims to have pushed 
New York from her seat as ruler of our 
commerce. The whole West and South are 
in open rebellion against her financial rule. 
Chicago equals, possibly outnumbers her, in 
population, and certainly outspeeds her in 
enterprise. The rise of Chicago as a literary 
and art centre is a question only of time, 
and of a very short time ; for the Columbian 
Exposition has taught her her own capabili- 
ties in something higher than business. The 
founding of vast libraries and universities 
and art museums is the first formal step, the 
preparation-stage ; expression will follow 
swiftly. Magazines and publishing-houses 
are to come. 

The writers have already risen. Every 



y 



Literary Centres. 153 

literary man must have a beginning some- 
where, and there are scores of original young 
writers and artists just rising to power in 
the West. They need only a channel for 
utterance ; it will come, and they will 
speak. 

It is not contended that the names quoted 
above are the best, — that they represent the / 
perfect art of the new school. Most of them 
are young writers, all of them are significant 
of things to come, but many of them are 
already of national, even international, fame. 
The absolutist in his sneer at the rising young 
artists forgets that the literary masters he 
worships were once as helpless to reply to 
the question : What have you done ? 

It is not intended to say that New York 
has not her native share in this new move- 
ment ; I aim merely to show that never 
again can a city or a group of States over- 
shadow the whole of literary America. It 
is not merely a question of New York and 
Chicago now, it is the rise of literary centres 
all over the nation. Henceforth, St. Louis, 
New Orleans, Atlanta, Denver, San Fran- 
cisco, Cincinnati, St. Paul, and Minneapolis, 



154 Crumbling Idols. 

and a dozen more interior cities are to be 
reckoned with. 

Like Avignon and Marseilles, they will 
have literary men and literary judgments of 
their own. The process is one of decentral- 
ization, together with one of unification. 

Never again will any city dominate Amer- 
ican literature ; and, in my judgment, there 
will be no over-topping personalities in art. 
The average is rising ; the peaks will seem 
to sink. 

There are other reasons for the revolt 
against the domination of the East over the 
whole nation. New York, like Boston, is too 
near London. It is no longer American. 
It is losing touch with the people. Chicago 
is much more American, notwithstanding its 
foreign population. Its dominant population 
is splendidly American, drawn from the im- 
mediate States, — Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, 
Wisconsin, Kentucky, and Ohio. It does not 
profess to be exclusive ; it professes to be a 
meeting-place. Of course, it has its tremu- 
lous and timid imitators of New York and 
Boston imitations of London and Paris ; 
but these people are in a sad minority. 



Literary Centres. 155 

The great body of men and women who 
give strength and originality to Chicago are 
people who care very little what New York 
thinks of their work, and the doings of 
London and Paris are not more vital. 

No critic whose eyes are not fastened upon 
the past can imagine a hopeless literary 
future for this great nation. To the con- 
servative, who thinks change necessarily 
destructive and hopeless, the future is a 
blank. To the radical, who feels change to 
be necessary and natural, the present and 
the future are filled with magnificent prom- 
ise. The horizon widens each year, includ- 
ing more cities, more writers, more lovers of 
light and song, more makers of literature. 
Literary invention is as inevitable as the 
manipulation of the material universe. The 
material always subtends the intellectual. 
Activity in material comes ultimately to be 
expressed, and expression is commensurate 
with the deed. 

" Bigness does not count," the East says 
in answer to the West. Yes, but it does ! 
The prairies lead to general conceptions. 
The winds give strength and penetration 



156 Crumbling Idols. 

and alertness. The mighty stretches of 
woods lead to breadth and generosity of 
intellectual conception. The West and 
South are coming to be something more 
than big, coming to the expression of a new 
world, coming to take their places in the 
world of literature, as in the world of action, 
and no sneer from gloomy prophets of the 
dying past can check or chill them. 

The literature which is already springing 
up in those great interior spaces of the South 
and West is to be a literature, not of books, 
but of life. It will draw its inspiration from 
original contact with men and with nature. 
It will have at first the rough-hewn quality 
of first-hand work. It is to out-run the old- 
world limitations. 

Its vitalizing element will be its difference 
of treatment, which will not be that of any 
other literature of any other place or time, 
and it is extremely improbable that it will 
ever submit to any central academy, whether 
in New York or Chicago. 

This school will be one where most nota- 
bly the individuality of each writer will be 
respected, and this forbids strict conformity 



Literary Centres. 157 

to accepted models. When life is the model 
and truth the criterion and individualism the 
coloring element of a literature, the central 
academy has small power. There will be 
association as of equals, not slavish accep- 
tance of dictation. 

Then again, hero-worship in literature is 
weakening. In the days when there were 
few literary men, and these few men pro- 
fessedly held strange powers entirely distinct 
from their fellows, something of awe went 
with the readers admiration. To-day, when 
the ranks of the poets are thick with adepts, 
and when the novelists write of comprehen- 
sible subjects and lay no claim to mystic 
power, both poet and novelist are approached 
without ceremony. This also weakens the 
hold of the central academy. 

The blight upon the literature of the 
West, like that of all provinces, has been 
its timidity, its tendency to work in accepted 
modes, its childish desire to write for the 
applause of its masters in the East. This 
has been, in fact, the weakness of the entire 
output of American literature. The West 
only emphasizes the fact. In material things, 



158 Crumbling Idols. 

America has boundless self-assertion, but in 
the arts it has imitated because of its failure 
to perceive its proper relation to the litera- 
ture of the world. The West, reckoning 
itself an annex of the East, has imitated 
imitations. 

Because the East considered itself Eng- 
lish in general character, the West, so far as 
most of its writers are concerned, has ac- 
quiesced. As a matter of fact, the West is 
not English. The Northwest is more largely- 
Teutonic and Scandinavian, and the peo- 
ple of Indiana, Ohio, and Illinois are far 
removed from England and from English 
conceptions of life ; and this distance is sure 
to find its statement in literature. Wiscon- 
sin, Iowa, Minnesota, Dakota, and other 
Western States are half composed of men 
and women of Germanic or Scandinavian 
extraction. The literature rising from these 
people will not be English. It will be some- 
thing new ; it will be, and ought to be, Amer- 
ican, — that is to say, a new composite. 

The centre of this literature of national 
scope, therefore, cannot be in the East. It 
will not be dominated by the English idea. 



Literary Centres i59 

It will have no reference to Tennyson or 
Longfellow or Arnold. Its reference to the 
north of Europe, to Norway or Germany, will 
have less of benumbing effect, for these 
northern peoples are not so deeply enslaved 
to the past as England is. 

The West should work in accordance with 
the fundamental principles of good writing; 
that is, it should seek to attain the most per- 
fect lucidity, expressiveness, flexibility, and 
grace. Its technique should be comprehen- 
sible, clear in outline, and infinitely sugges- 
tive, ready to be submitted to the world, but 
free to use new forms. 

The choice of subject and the quality which 
enters into it, like a subtle flavor into wzne, 
should be individual, not subject to any school 

or master. 

The judgment of the East should take rank 
merely among other judgments; it should 
not be held all-important. 

The purpose of this writing is not merely 
to combat literary centralization, but also to 
build up local centres. Wherever a human 
soul is moved by genuine love of nature and 
of men to the conscientious and faithful study 



i6o Crumbling Idols. 

of the expression of his emotions, there is a 
literary centre. Around him are grouped 
minds whose candid criticism can aid and 
direct him ; but this criticism must not evade, 
nor demand conformity to tradition ; it must 
demand of the young writer truth, sincerity, 
and individuality. 

Let the critics of the local centres remem- 
ber Mistral and Whitcomb Riley, who won 
their way among the people before the criti- 
cal journals would take count of them. It 
is the man who has no knowledge of accepted 
forms, and who therefore refers every work of 
art back to nature, who is quickest to respond 
to the literature of life. The average Ameri- 
can is quick to thrill to real emotion, only he 
wants it direct and unaffected. 

I believe in the local magazine. With the 
growth of inland cities in wealth and refine- 
ment, the magazine will come to displace the 
mere newspaper, possibly the newspaper will 
grow into the magazine. The work of the 
local magazines like " The Southern," " The 
Californian," "The Midland," "The Over- 
land," can be made of vast importance in the 
nation's life. 



Literary Centres. i6i 

Let them keep close to the local life, devel- 
oping the best — that is, the simplest and 
most natural — talent of their region, making 
their appeal constantly to the unspoiled yet 
discerning taste of the middle-conditioned 
people, and they will succeed. " They have 
always failed in the past," says the doubter ; 
possibly, but the past is not the present 
or the future. Taste is rising. Culture is 
broadening swiftly. A new generation is 
coming on, — a generation of veritists. Con- 
ditions grow more hospitable to this local 
literature with great rapidity. What was true 
of local conditions five years ago will scarcely 
be true to-day. 

O Sayers and Doers of this broad, free 
inland America of ours ! to you is given the 
privilege of being broad and free in your life 
and letters. You should not be bound to a 
false and dying culture, you should not 
endeavor to re-enact the harsh and fierce 
and false social dramas of the Old World. 
You should not turn your face to the east, to 
the past. Your comment should be that of 
free men and women, loving equality, justice, 
truth. 



1 62 Crumbling Idols 

Yours not to worship crumbling idols ; your 
privilege and pleasure should be to face life 
and the material earth in a new way, — mould- 
ing old forms of government into new 
shapes, catching from earth and 
sea and air, new songs to 
sing, new thoughts to 
frame, new deeds 
to dare. 



XI. 



LITERARY MASTERS. 



IT is all a question 
of masters. There 

LITERARY MASTERS. 

are masters who set 
free, there are masters who enslave. The 
best critic is he who frees, and the best 
criticism of the Old World has demanded of 
America, not imitations of the old forms, but 
free, faithful, characteristic work. It is the 
second-class critic who enslaves to the past, 
unable to comprehend advance. 

For fifty years the best critics of England 
and of Europe have been calling for the 
native utterance of American writers. Pos- 
nett, Dowden, Taine, V^ron, Freiligrath, 
Bjornson, every critic who has perceived 
the forward movement of all art, has looked 
for a new conception, a new flavor, a new 
manner in American literature ; and almost 
as constantly have the conservative and 
narrow critics of Boston and New York 
discouraged the truest, freest utterance of 



1 66 Crumbling Idols. 

the American poet and novelist. Not all 
have been of this hopeless type, but it 
remains true as a general comment. Upon 
the tender springing plant of American liter- 
ature the frost of conservative culture has 
ever fallen. No wonder the young writer 
has turned to copying old forms, and so 
benumbed and sterilized his creative soul. 

It really comes down to a contest, not 
between the East and the JVest, but between 
sterile culture and creative work; between 
mere scholarship and wisdom; between con- 
servative criticism and native original liter- 
ary production. 

It is a question of books versus a litera- 
ture of life, a struggle between adaption to 
new surroundings and conformity to the 
ancestral type. It is only because there 
happen to be more conservatives in the East 
that the contest takes on the appearance 
of a war between East and West. 

The East has its magnificent radicals, men 
who stand for free art and modern art. I 
do not forget the encouragement which the 
young writer owes to them ; and yet these 
Eastern radicals will be the first to acknowl- 



Literary Masters. 167 

edge the truth I write concerning the dangers 
of a centralization of power. 

Shall our literature be a literature of the 
East, in mode if not in subject, or shall it be 
national ? Is it to be only so large as the 
conception of New York and Boston critics, 
or shall it be as big and broad and democra- 
tic as the best thought of the whole nation ? 
Is every work of art of every Western or 
Southern man or woman to be submitted 
with timid air to a jury that represents only 
a section of American society, — a section 
which is really nearer the Old World than 
the New, — or shall the writing be addressed 
to the whole nation ? Is it safe to depend 
upon a half-dozen publishing houses, or a 
half-dozen magazines, for outlet ? Would it 
not be better to have many magazines, pro- 
vided, of course, the standard of excellence 
were high ? Editors and critics are human. 
They are Hkely, at best, to be biassed by 
their personal likes and dislikes. It is not 
well that too much power be vested in any 
one city. 

The supposition is that America finds 
amplest outlet in its present magazines, which 



1 68 Crumbling Idols. 

are mainly in the East ; but this is not true. 
It is a physical impossibility first; and, 
second, the theory is that the magazines are 
conducted for Eastern readers and in har- 
mony with the traditions inherited by the 
East. 

This is not complaint. No young writer 
of to-day has less cause for complaint than I. 
It is a statement of fact. There have arisen 
in the East these great magazines, hospita- 
ble in their way, but limited and inadequate 
to the expression of the art-life of this great 
nation. Their influence has been beneficent, 
— is yet ; but there is a greater, truer, and 
freer expression of this people which will 
come only with the rise of native inland 
magazines. 

As a matter of fact, this controversy is 
not sectional. It is in the East as well as in 
the West. All over America, in towns and 
cities, there are groups of readers whom our 
reigning monthlies do not represent. These 
readers have not only all the substantial 
acquirements of the conservatives, but pos- 
sess a broader Americanism and a more inti- 
mate knowledge of American life than the 



Literary Masters. 169 

aristocrat who prides himself on never having 
been farther west than Buffalo. 

The culture represented by these radicals 
is not alone based upon knowledge of dead 
forms of art; it includes living issues of 
art. The number of these readers increases 
year by year. They stand for ideas and con- 
ditions of the future, and from them artists 
are rising, filled with courage and moved by 
convictions of their allegiance to truth. These 
people demand something more than smooth 
conventional work. They realize the tendency 
of young authors not to write as they really 
feel, but as they think the editors of the 
great magazines would have them write. 
They realize the danger which lies in putting 
into the hands of a few men, no matter how 
fine they may be, the directing power of 
American literature. 

These cultivated and fearless radicals join 
Western readers in saying, *' By what right 
do you of the conservative East assume to 
be final judges of American literature ? 
What special qualifications does a residence 
on the extreme eastern shore of our nation 
give you, by which to settle all questions of 
a national literature ? " 



170 Crumbling Idols. 

" The West is crude," Eastern critics are 
fond of saying. 

" What do you mean by that ? Do you 
mean that there are not men and women of 
the highest type in the West ? Do you mean 
that we do not conform to your specific ideal 
of culture ? Or do you mean that we have 
not been self-respecting enough in our own 
thinking? In what lies your assumed supe- 
riority over the West ? " 

To this the East replies : " We are the 
occupying claimants of the glory of the great 
men of this century's literature. We have 
also the great libraries, the museums, the 
great universities, which make us the centre 
of critical intelligence. Granting your great 
railways, your stupendous enterprises, your 
great cities, the East still remains, and must 
remain, the centre of the highest literary 
culture in America." 

The West rejoins : " That is precisely the 
point at issue. We deny that the East is to 
be the exclusive home of the broadest cul- 
ture. We feel that much of this culture is 
barren and insincere. It has a hopeless 
outlook. It leads nowhere. It treads a 
circle, like the logic of the Koran. 



Literary Masters. 171 

" Culture is not creative power. Scholar- 
ship does not imply wisdom. We do not 
believe a city at our farthest East can 
remain the city most progressive in its art, 
most unbiassed in its judgments. The 
American city of broadest culture is hence- 
forth to be that where the broad, free cur- 
rents of American life daily ebb and flow. 
Such a city can know and will know all 
that the East knows of fundamental prin- 
ciples of art and literature, and will have 
a wider knowledge of the scope and action 
of American life." 

The conservative of the East then says : 
" It will take a hundred vears to make a West- 
ern city into the likeness of New York or 
Boston. The mellow charm of our literary 
atmosphere is the growth of two centuries. 
Our very streets are lined with suggestive 
walls and historical tablets. Our drawing- 
rooms and our clubs represent the flowering 
culture of ten generations." 

The West quickly responds : " Keep your 
past. Hug your tablets to your bosom : 
you are welcome to all that; we are con- 
cerned with the present, and with the splen- 



172 Crumbling Idols. 

dor of the future. Your culture is too largely 
of the moribund. Cleverness will not save 
you. You fail to conceive that our idea of 
culture is a different and, we assert, a higher 
form, because it refers to a culture of living 
forms. Besides, culture, even of the broad- 
est, is only part of it ; creative power is the 
crowning splendor of a nation's life. Scholar- 
ship does not necessarily imply wisdom. 
The study of the past does little for original 
genius. Libraries and universities produce 
few of the great leaders of American thought ; 
all that books can give is our inheritance as 
well as yours," 

The radical continues: "We deny that 
the Eastern * art atmosphere ' is necessary 
to the production of original works of art. 
We doubt the ability of New York or 
Boston criticism to pass final judgment 
upon a Western work of art, because the 
conditions of our life are outside the circle of 
its intimate knowledge. A criticism which 
stands for old things, we repeat, is not the 
criticism which is to aid the production of 
characteristic American art. America is not 
to submit itself to the past ; it is to be free." 



Literary Masters. 173 

" Do you mean to say that you propose to 
cut loose from the past ? " asks the tradition- 
alist. 

** By no means. We expect to assert our 
right to our day, as Russia, Norway, Ger- 
many, and others of our neighbor nations 
have done. The youth of all nations are in the 
fight. We are in the midst of one of those 
returning cycles of progress in art when the 
young man attains his majority. America 
has begun to attain her majority, to claim the 
right to a free choice in art as well as in 
government, to speak her own mind in her 
own way." 

" Permit us — are you to use as a medium, 
Choctaw or English ? " the East inquires, in 
strenuously polite phrase. 

"That illustrates the inadequateness and 
the illiberality of your attitude toward us. 
We propose to use the speech of living men 
and women. We are to use actual speech 
as we hear it and to record its changes. We 
are to treat of the town and city as well as of 
the farm, each in its place and through the 
medium of characteristic speech. We pro- 
pose to discard your nipping accent, your 



174 Crumbling Idols. 

nice phrases, your balanced sentences, and 
your neat proprieties inherited from the eigh- 
teenth century. Our speech is to be as 
individual as our view of life." 

The conservative replies: "Your view of 
life is of no interest to us. We do not see 
the necessity of Americans troubling to write 
or paint at all in future. We have books 
and paintings enough in the market. When 
we want a book, we buy a classic, and know 
what we are getting. When we want a paint- 
ing, there are Corots and Rousseaus and 
Bouguereaus in the markets. Produce wheat 
and corn and railway-stocks yet awhile, and 
don't trouble yourself about literary prob- 
lems. Read the classics for the improve- 
ment of your style. In the mean time, we 
will see that American literature is not 
vulgarized." 

The Western radical warmly replies : " Who 
constituted you the guardian of American 
literature .? What do you know of the needs 
or tastes of the people — " 

Testily the aristocrat breaks in: " My dear 
sir, I care nothing for any tastes but my 
own. I don't like the common American in 



Literary Masters. 175 

life, and I don't like him in books. There- 
fore— " 

"There! " rejoins the radical, triumphantly. 
"There is a second point admitted. You 
have no sympathy with the American peo- 
ple of middle condition. You are essentially 
aristocratic and un-American in your posi- 
tion. From your library, or from the car- 
window, you look upon our life ; that is the 
extent of your knowledge of our conditions, 
at best. For the most part you have never 
been west of Niagara Falls. How can you 
be just to this literature which springs from 
a life you do not know or sympathize 
with ? 

" We are forming a literature from direct 
contact with life, and such a literature can 
be estimated only by unbiassed minds and 
by comparison with nature and the life we 
live. Are you fitted to be the court of last 
resort upon our writing by reason of your 
study of English novels and your study of 
last-century painting? The test of a work 
of art is not. Does it conform to the best 
models ? but, Does it touch and lift and 
exalt men ? And we profess ability to per- 



176 Crumbling Idols. 

ceive these qualities even west of the Missis- 
sippi River. 

"We care little for the free-masonry of 
literary phrases which relates one spectacled 
enthusiast over dead men's books to a simi- 
lar devotee of dead men's pictures. The 
West should aim to be wise rather than 
cultured. Wisdom is democratic, culture is 
an aristocrat. Wisdom is knowledge of 
principle, culture is a knowledge of forms 
and accepted conditions; the contention is 
world old, but necessary." 

In the above colloquy, which may be 
typical in a measurable degree, I have put 
the Western radical over against the Eastern 
conservative, not because there are not con- 
servatives in the West and radicals in the 
East, but because it is my sincere convic- 
tion, taking the largest view, that the in- 
terior is to be henceforth the real America. 
From these interior spaces of the South 
and West the most vivid and fearless and 
original utterance of the coming American 
democracy vi^ill come. 

This is my conviction. I might adduce 



Literary Masters. 



77 



arguments based on the difference in races ; 
I might speculate upon the influence of the 
Irish and Jews and Italians upon New 
York and Boston, and point out the quicker 
assimilation of the Teutonic races in the 
West, but it would only be passed over by 
the reader. 

I confess to a certain failure to adequately 
portray what I mean. The things I would 
put in evidence are intangible. There are 
the mighty spaces of the West, the swarming 
millions of young men and women coming 
on in this empire of the Mississippi valley. 
Some imaginative Easterners caught glimpses 
of it at the Exposition, where the Eastern cul- 
ture and accent was swallowed up and lost 
in the mighty flood of the middle West, un- 
known and inarticulate, but tremendous in 
its mass. 

It is impossible to convey to others the 
immense faith in this land which intimate 
knowledge, gained by fifty thousand miles 
of travel, has built up in me. I know my 
West ; I know its young minds. I can see 
their eager faces before me as I write. I 
know the throb of creative force everywhere 

12 



178 Crumbling Idols. 

thrilling the young men and women of these 
States, and yet I realize my inability to put 
it in evidence. I might mention names, 
writers of whose power I am assured, — 
they would be unknown ; circumstances may 
crush them. 

America is the most imaginative and 
creative of nations. Its inventions, its huge 
constructions, prove that. Only in its litera- 
ture and art has it been bound by tradition. 
Its inventive and its original constructive 
genius arose from needs which dominated 
tradition. Its great railways, bridges, tun- 
nels, transportation facilities, were perfected 
by minds which rose out of the common 
ranks of American life. The genuine Amer- 
ican literature, in the same way, must come 
from the soil and the open air, and be like- 
wise freed from tradition. Such an epoch is 
upon us. 

Lowell felt this, in spite of his English 
environment. In his old age something of 
his early faith in America came back to him. 

" No : morning and the dewy prime are born 
into the earth again with every child. It is our 



Literary Masters. 179 

fault if drouth and dust usurp the noon, . . . 

Our time is not an unpoetic one. This lesson I 

learn from the past : that grace and goodness, the 

fair, the noble, and the true will never cease 

out of the world till the God from whom 

they emanate ceases out of it. . . . 

V Lives of the great poets teach 

us they were the men of 

their generation who 

felt most deeply the 

meaning of the 

present.*' 



XII. 



A RECAPITULATORY AFTER- 
WORD. 



jjjj THERE come times 

A RECAPITULATORY ^^ *^^ development 
of every art when 

AFTER-WORD. ^ 

the creative mind 
re-asserts itself, and shakes itself loose from 
the terrible power of the past. This dis- 
sent, this demand for artistic freedom, is 
always made by youth, and always meets 
with the bitter and scornful opposition of the 
old. To conform is easy, — it is like sleep. 
To dissent is action in the interests of the 
minority. 

At certain times a great writer like Dante 
or Shakespeare or Hugo or Ibsen rises, — a 
grand innovator and dissenter, — and holds 
intellectual dominion over the world during 
his life, apparently by his personal force 
and expression ; and after his death, critics 
who draw their rules of art from him come 
to worship and bow down before him as 
a demigod of literature. He becomes a 
fetich. 



1 84 Crumbling Idols. 

Once an author reaches this stage, he be- 
comes an incubus. His personal defects are 
exalted into universal excellencies, methods 
to be copied. He becomes the standard of 
measurement for the critic without discern- 
ment or judgment of his own. It is so 
easy to say of the new artist, " He paints 
purple shadows on the snow ; Corot did not, 
therefore the young artist is wrong." Of such 
is the criticism based upon past models. 

Meanwhile, Shakespeare and Corot are in- 
nocent of this. Were Corot living to-day, he 
would be in the advance line of present art. 
Shakespeare would be grappling with present 
themes, like the tremendous iconoclast he 
was. Burns would be a social radical and 
a writer of modern dialect. These men re- 
belled against authority in their day. They 
did not dream of becoming obstructing au- 
thorities after their death. 

As a matter of fact, literary power is not 
personal; it is at bottom sociologic. The 
power of the writer is derived from the so- 
ciety in which he lives ; like the power of a 
general, which springs from the obedience of 
his army. When society changes, when his 



A Recapitulatory After-^ord. 185 

audience dies, the writer's power passes away. 
This is the natural law, and would take way 
easily and quickly were there not other ten- 
dencies to conserve and retard, just as in the 
animal organisms. 

Schools are conservative forces. They are 
nearly always linked with the aristocratic 
and the old, especially in their art instruc- 
tions. Universities are bulwarks of tradi- 
tion. They are pools left on the beach 
by an ebbing tide. They conserve the 
past. They study the living present but 
little. They are founded upon books. 
They teach conformity, they do not develop 
personality. 

The natural thing for our society to-day 
is to demand of its artists fresh and vivid 
interpretations of nature and society. The 
feudalistic forms of life are drawing off. 
The certainly democratic is coming on. It 
is natural for Americans to say : Sophocles, 
Shakespeare, Moliere, Schiller do not satisfy 
us. They represent other outlooks upon 
life. They do not touch us directly. We 
prefer a more human and sympathetic art, — 
something nearer and sweeter. 



1 86 Crumbling Idols. 

This, I repeat, is the natural feeling of the 
ordinary man or woman of to-day, and yet 
such has been the power of the conservative 
forces in art that the dissenter acquiesced 
in outer expression while privately throwing 
his Shakespeare aside for Dickens, George 
Eliot, Hugo, and Turgenief. He has ap- 
plauded the orator who said " Shakespeare 
ended the drama ; " but he has left Shake- 
speare to gather dust on his library walls 
while he reads the newspaper and meets his 
friends in conversation about the latest comic 
opera. In other words, literary hypocrites 
are made plentiful by the pressure of conser- 
vative criticism precisely as in the religious 
world. 

The quality most needed in literary dis- 
cussion to-day is not learning, it is candor. 
Literary discussion is full of lies. Men pro- 
fess to admire things which do not touch 
them. They uphold forms of art which they 
know to be dead. They fear to be called 
destructionists. They feel in some way bound 
to lie for the sake of youth. Youth must be 
dulled into a literary hypocrite, and so all 
mouths are set awry. 



A Recapitulatory After-ivord. 187 

But an era of reorganization is upon us. 
The common man is again moving in intel- 
lectual unrest, as in the time of Burns and 
Shelley. The young men are to speak their 
minds. The re-assertion of artistic indepen- 
dence is to be made. The literary fetich is 
to fail of power, and original genius once 
more push the standards of art forward. 

As a matter of fact, old idols are crumbling 
in literature and painting as in religion. 
" Changeless throughout the centuries, they 
sit upon their inapproachable thrones," cries 
the rhetorician; but it is only a fine figure of 
speech. As a matter of fact, they are being 
worn away. An impalpable sand, blown upon 
them by ceaseless winds from free spaces, 
has worn them down ; their blurred features 
wear a look of vague appeal. They are no 
longer as gods ! 

Below them the changing currents of hu- 
man life, grown quicker, pass by without 
looking up there where they sit Great seams 
are opening in the base of their thrones ; they 
will soon fall, these few remaining ones, as 
all the others have fallen, and the rivers of 
life will pass by on the other side. 



1 88 Crumbling Idols. 

That this should happen seems dreadful 
and impossible to the conservative mind ; to 
the dissenter, it is in conformity with the 
great law of evolution. The dynamic con- 
ception of art does not mourn over decay ; it 
faces the on-coming day, content to be and 
to do, now. 

" iEschylus, there he lies, deep in the past, 
, a colossal fragment, his brow projecting 
I above the sands of centuries," cries Hugo. 
Yes, there he lies, and there Shakespeare 
lies, sunk and sinking, just as every other 
human soul sinks into the sand. In the 
illimitable sweep of the centuries there is 
little to choose between a reign of two cen- 
turies and one of fifty years. 

In the carcass of every dead lion, maggots 
breed and fatten, unmindful of the green grass 
and the fresh wind blowing by, hearing not 
the living lion's royal tread. So the scholiast 
\ bores and bores in the dead body of the past ; 
^ his sluggish sense dead to the smell of grow- 
ing corn and the moving by of living things. 

Not from such sources does a living litera- 
ture flow. Each age of strong creative cap- 
ability reveals life in its own fashion ; that 



A Recapitulatory After-word. 189 

is, each creative age in the past uttered its 
own truth as over against the convention- 
alized dogmas of its teachers. I believe such 
a period of literary breaking-away has come 
in America. Whitman announced it, but 
could not exemplify it in popular form. He 
voiced its force, its love of liberty and love of 
comrades, but he was the prophet, not the 
exemplar. He said well, that the real lit- 
erature of America could not be a polite 
literature. The nation is too great, too 
sincere. 

There is coming in this land the mightiest 
assertion in art of the rights of man and the 
glory of the physical universe ever made in 
the world. It will be done, not by one man, 
but by many men and women. It will be 
born, not of drawing-room culture, nor of 
imitation, nor of fear of masters, nor will it 
come from homes of great wealth. It will 
come from the average American home, in 
the city as well as in the country. It will 
deal with all kinds and conditions. It will 
be born of the mingling seas of men in the 
vast interior of America, because there the 



190 Crumbling Idols. 

problem of the perpetuity of our democracy, 
the question of the liberty as well as the 
nationality of our art, will be fought out. 
This literature will be too great to submit to 
the domination of any literary centre or liter- 
ary master. With cities of a half a mil- 
lion inhabitants, scattered from Pittsburg to 
Seattle, New York and Chicago will alike 
be made humble. 

Rise, O young man and woman of Amer- 
ica ! Stand erect ! Face the future with a 
song on your lips and the light of a broader 
day in your eyes. Turn your back on the 
past, not in scorn, but in justice to the future. 
Cease trying to be correct, and become crea- 
tive. This is our day. The past is not 
vital. It is a highway of dust, and Homer, 
^schylus, Sophocles, Dante, Shakespeare 
are milestones. Libraries do not create 
great poets and artists; they seldom aid, 
and they often warp and destroy them. To 
know Shakespeare is good. To know your 
fellow-men is better. All that Shakespeare 
knew of human life, you may know, but 
not at second hand, not through Shake- 



A Recapitulatory AFTER-n^ORD 191 

speare, not through the eyes of the dead, but 
at first hand. 



In evolution there are always two vast 
fundamental forces: one, the inner, which 
propels ; the other, the outer, which adapts 
and checks. One forever thrusts toward 
new forms, the other forever moulds, con- 
serves, adapts, reproduces. Progress is the 
resultant of these forces. 

The force that flowers is the individual, 
that which checks and moulds is environ- 
ment. Impulse is the stronger to-day, to- 
morrow conformity chills and benumbs. Of 
such cycles is the history of art. Rebellious 
youth breaks from the grim hand of the 
past and toils in his own way till he grows 
old, and then becomes oppressor in his 
turn ; and death again liberates youth, whose 
keen nostril breathes again the air of heaven 
as if the centuries had been clock-ticks. 

Of what avail then, O you of the dead 
past ! 

What fear ye, O youth, to whom life smells 
so sweet ! Accept the battle challenge cheer- 



192 Crumbling Idols. 

fully, as those before you have done. What 
you win, you must fight for as of old. And 
remember, life and death both fight with you. 

Idols crumble and fall, but the skies lift 
/ their unmoved arch of blue, and 
the earth sends forth its rhyth- 
mic pulse of green, and in 
the blood of youth there 
comes the fever of 
rebellious art. 



. • . Printed by John 
IVibon & Son .• . at 
the Uni'versity Press 
. in Cambridge for . 
Stone & Kimball 
in the year of our Lord 
. . MDCCCXCIF. . 



Si 

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